The 2019 Grammys was a night of transgression. Sam Smith and Kim Petras embraced Satanism on a major American network TV show, and the left were shocked and appalled by it. What does this say about the state of our culture and how it views Satanism? And what does it mean for the future of the culture and the people who shape it? And why is it so important that it happened at a major public event hosted by the left-wing media and entertainment establishment? Ben Shapiro breaks it down and explains why it's important that the left embrace Satanism at such a public event, and why it matters. Plus, we examine the wildest moments from the Grammys, including Joe Biden's attempt to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon, and we examine how mainstream the mainstream media and the entertainment establishment view Satanism as a "good character." and how the event started off with Trevor Noah opening up up with a joke about the people in the room. Welcome to The Grammys. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen, and it's one I'm sure you'll agree that it's going to be another one in the history of funny people on Earth! -Ben Shapiro The Weekly Standard Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to our new podcast "The Weekly Standard - Rate/subscribe to our newest podcast, "The Bachelorette" - The Bana Show! and become a supporter of our new show, "Mr. Ben Shapiro's "Ben Shapiro's Unfiltered" wherever you get your ad is available. Subscribe and review the show! Subscribe to our podcast! - Rate and review our newest episode of "The Daily Bana's Uncut Podcast" Subscribe on Podulism, wherever you listen to the show? Subscribe for a chance to win a copy of his newest issue of his new book "Unleash Your Day Offers?" Subscribe to his newest podcast "Uncle Ben's Unleash My Mind" and much more! Learn more like Ben Shapiro is a fellow Ben Shapiro will be giving you'll get a discount code "The Best Thing He Said Sober than That's Best Thing I've Ever Gave Me That?" Subscribe and Subscribe to Ben Shapiro "The Realest Thing I'm Gonna Do That?" - Subscribe to His Story? and more!
00:00:28.000I mean, there are many things that would have been better than watching the Grammys last night.
00:00:32.000But it is important to note what happens at major cultural events.
00:00:35.000Largely because it exposes the minds and the souls of the people who produce these events and the people who shape your kids.
00:00:41.000Because while you may not be listening to the music of Harry Styles, while you may not be engaging with the absurdities of Sam Smith, there's a good shot that your kids are, or that their friends are, or that people in the culture who shape them Are.
00:01:03.000You can go all the way back to David Bowie and Madonna.
00:01:06.000What we saw last night at the Grammys was actually something that was rather new in kind, because it wasn't just transgressivism in the sense that it was adopting symbols of religion, for example, in order to sort of shame those symbols of religion, the same way that Madonna Sort of tried to cross the virgin whore boundaries in her imagistics.
00:01:24.000What we saw last night was a full-scale embrace of Satanism on a major American network show.
00:01:31.000And it's an amazing thing because what it really speaks to in a much deeper way is what Western culture now has to say about evil and the nature of good.
00:01:40.000Because it is one thing to say that you don't like the structures of religion.
00:01:44.000It is another thing to full on embrace Satanism.
00:01:47.000And, you know, people can can say, again, it's just it's just imagery.
00:01:50.000What are you making a big deal here for?
00:02:33.000The reason I'm bringing this up for folks who missed the Grammys, you know, like nearly all of you, is because last night, Sam Smith and a person named Kim Petras did a number in which they full-on embraced Satanism.
00:02:51.000To sort of set the stage, you have to understand that this is a group of mainstream left-wing cultural icons.
00:02:57.000Those are the people who are in the room.
00:02:59.000So mainstream, in fact, that one of the people who actually was brought on to give the the top award was the current president of the United States, Dr. Joe Biden, the greatest doctor of all time, and also the president, because our current president is basically a meat puppet and and does not have the capacity to actually operate in the real world.
00:03:18.000He cannot even spew words from his face in some sort of coherent fashion.
00:03:22.000So, Dr. Joe Biden, this is how mainstream the Grammys is.
00:03:25.000It's not some sort of fringe satanic ritual.
00:03:27.000It's satanic rituals front and center at a major public event.
00:03:31.000So the event started off with Trevor Noah, who is one of the least funny people on earth, opening up with a Trump joke.
00:05:07.000In a second, we're gonna get to the satanic aspect of the Grammys, which ties into a broader sort of Intellectual rubric.
00:05:14.000First, if we're talking about people who should not be trusted with your kids, we're talking about these people.
00:05:17.000If we're talking about people who should not be trusted with your data, we're talking about big tech.
00:05:21.000How would it feel if you were at a coffee shop and you're sitting there and just going through your emails and then you're like, oh, you know, I need to hit the restroom.
00:05:26.000So you move on over to the restroom, but you leave your laptop on the table.
00:05:45.000The simple fact of the matter is there are a lot of engineers who want control of your data.
00:05:48.000We're talking about big tech that wants control of your data so they can monetize it and they can use it to advertise and make money off of you while they despise you.
00:05:55.000You have big government that actually works with big tech to grab a hold of that data.
00:05:59.000You have hackers who are constantly trying to grab that data.
00:06:00.000I don't want any of those people to have my data.
00:09:25.000The actual full performance has Sam Smith gallivanting around in a devil costume, wearing like a top hat with devil horns and surrounded by strippers, both male and female is my understanding, or trans.
00:09:49.000Well, it turns out that I think that the iconography with regard to Satan actually kind of is important because it's embedded deep in the Western psyche.
00:09:55.000What Satan is and what Satan isn't, whether that is good or not.
00:09:57.000By the way, you know who agrees with this?
00:09:59.000is Kim Petras, who said, quote, I think a lot of people honestly have kind of labeled what I stand for and what Sam stands for as religiously not cool.
00:10:06.000I personally grew up wondering about religion and wanting to be a part of it, but slowly realizing it didn't want me to be a part of it.
00:10:11.000So it's a take on not being able to choose religion and not being able to live the way that people might want you to live, because as a trans person, I'm already not kind of wanted in religion.
00:10:22.000So the whole video is flames emerging in the background and people wearing devil uniforms and prancing around in costume and all the rest.
00:10:28.000So normally, you would just say, OK, this is normal kind of garbage transgressivism on the Grammys, whether it's Madonna lip locking Britney Spears or Britney Spears dancing around with a snake around her, or whether you're talking about Madonna gallivanting around doing silly things in sort of a Madonna in a Virgin Mary outfit during like this sort of thing has a long record.
00:10:47.000But the full on embrace of Satanism is important in the sense that, again, There are certain icons in Western intellectual history that, how we view them, sort of speaks about what our culture is.
00:10:57.000And the fact that you have an entire side of the cultural aisle that has now embraced Satan as a symbol, I don't think is by accident.
00:11:05.000To sort of understand this, I think we have to take a look at how Satan has been perceived over the course of Western civilization for the past couple of centuries.
00:11:13.000So, way back when, John Milton wrote Paradise Lost.
00:11:18.000Paradise Lost is still the single best sort of articulation of the Western view of what Satan is.
00:11:24.000It's sort of a complex view, an interesting view of who Satan is.
00:11:27.000Satan is not just a malevolent monster.
00:11:33.000Satan is somebody who has been cast down from heaven.
00:11:36.000And Satan has come to be seen by the progressive left, and this has been true for a couple of centuries, as a heroic figure.
00:11:43.000This is not how John Milton meant for Satan to be interpreted in Paradise Lost.
00:11:46.000Paradise Lost was written in the 17th century.
00:11:48.000John Milton was a religious Christian.
00:11:50.000The way that he wrote Satan, however, inspires many people who don't like religion and who believe that the highest possible good is your individual sense of self-satisfaction.
00:12:02.000Satan in Paradise Lost very famously says, in my choice to reign is worth ambition though in hell, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
00:12:09.000It's the big kind of tagline for Satan in Paradise Lost is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
00:12:14.000And the whole reason that Satan rebels against God is not because he actually thinks that God is morally wrong.
00:12:19.000It's because he believes that individual autonomy, that his sense of power, is more important than anything.
00:12:24.000He rebels against God specifically because God demands good things of him.
00:12:28.000Not because he thinks that God is demanding bad things of him, but because he recognizes that God stands for a higher morality, something good and true.
00:12:34.000He rebels against it specifically for that reason.
00:12:38.000But that rebellion, for large parts of the transgressive mind over the course of the last several centuries, That rebellion is heroic in this view, and that has now become the full-fledged view of so many on the left, and they don't even know that this is the case.
00:12:53.000First, if you look at the economy these days, a lot of people telling you that the economy is going to go great guns, that Joe Biden has somehow achieved a soft landing.
00:13:06.000One of the things that I am doing to prepare for that is I'm diversifying at least a little bit into precious metals, and you should do the same.
00:13:12.000Gold has withstood inflation, geopolitical turmoil, and stock market crashes for literally ever.
00:13:16.000It is the most durable store of value in human history.
00:13:19.000You should consider converting your IRA or 401k into an IRA in precious metals.
00:13:22.000You can own gold in a tax shelter retirement account.
00:13:24.000You can talk to the experts over at Birchgold.
00:13:27.000They've got an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
00:13:28.000Thousands of happy customers, countless five star reviews.
00:13:32.000The reason that I'm invested in precious metals again is because I don't think that the government should have essentially unilateral control over the value of my asset base.
00:13:40.000Diversification is just a smart strategy.
00:14:03.000So, again, the vision of Satan in Paradise Lost, and Milton is making Satan the villain, is that it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
00:14:10.000Namely, individual autonomy, my sense of self-satisfaction, my sense of power, is much more important than any sense of good or true.
00:14:18.000And one person, a romantic poet, who really bought into the idea that Satan was the good guy in Paradise Lost was Percy Shelley.
00:14:26.000Percy Shelley, his wife, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
00:14:28.000Percy Shelley, of course, is a very famous romantic poet.
00:14:30.000And here is what he wrote about Milton's devil.
00:14:32.000Quote, Milton's devil as a moral being is far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose, which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture.
00:14:41.000So what exactly is the purpose of Satan?
00:14:43.000And when you look at Paradise Lost, what exactly is Satan's purpose?
00:14:47.000The answer is not that Satan seeks to do something good for others.
00:14:50.000He explicitly acknowledges he's not doing anything good for others.
00:14:53.000His purpose is, I refuse to be bossed around.
00:14:55.000I refuse to abide by standards of good and true that I don't personally enjoy or personally like.
00:15:01.000I prefer to rule myself than to be ruled by something that is good and true and good for other people.
00:15:08.000And so in order to see Satan as a sort of hero, what you have to do is see society and its rules and religion and its strictures.
00:15:52.000Percy Shelley is writing at the beginning of the 19th century and this sounds really, really modern.
00:15:56.000He's talking about how the only thing that you should be answerable to is your own sense of happiness.
00:16:00.000And if that happiness can only be achieved by casting off all societal rules, all responsibilities to other people, all goods that actually achieve good and happy for enormous numbers of people, If the only way to achieve your own sense of happiness in the moment, your own sense of sexual joy in the moment, is to throw away everything else, you throw away everything else.
00:16:21.000This is why, for example, Percy Shelley was a big advocate of the idea that all sexual unions between two people should end as soon as some sort of obligation that makes you feel bad about yourself attaches.
00:16:31.000So he said, quote, If happiness be the object of morality, if all human unions and disunion, if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, Then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the comfort of the parties and is naturally dissolved when its evils are greater than its benefits.
00:16:51.000There is nothing immoral in the separation.
00:16:52.000In other words, marriage is bad because marriage requires you to stick with a person for whom you may not have a joyous feeling at the moment.
00:16:59.000At the very instant when your pleasurable sensations mitigate at that very instant, You are now allowed to, and not only allowed, you should be obligated by Percy Shelley's moral system to break all the ties that bind, to throw away your morality, throw away your sense of responsibility.
00:17:15.000And that's what you're seeing at the Grammys.
00:17:16.000What you're seeing at the Grammys is the dumbed down, incredibly stupid version of what Percy Shelley is saying in the early 19th century.
00:17:24.000He's basically saying that morality, religion, rules, all of that stuff is bad.
00:17:29.000True happiness is the thing that lies within.
00:17:32.000Satan is good because Satan encourages you to worship yourself.
00:17:36.000Satan, he wants you to worship him, but the way that you worship him is first you worship yourself.
00:17:41.000You are basically the conduit for Satan.
00:17:43.000Worshipping your sense of sexual joy, worshipping your sense of subjective happiness at the expense of everyone else, at the expense of broader standards of morality, or true, or good, or beautiful.
00:17:55.000If you can do all those things, then Satan is standing right behind that.
00:18:00.000That's always the case, by the way, that religion is made.
00:18:02.000And so what's happened now is that true Satan worshipers, I don't mean people who are like going in the back room and killing chickens or something, but people who worship that idea, they've now embraced it and done so openly instead of holding satanic rituals on national television.
00:18:15.000And they're out there basically saying, you're right.
00:18:32.000We're aware that you're attempting to offend.
00:18:34.000And it's not that I'm offended as much as I think it is a very, very clear view into who you are if you think that this sort of thing is good.
00:18:43.000By the way, they think that this is good for children.
00:18:45.000If you think that this is just directed at adults, you are wrong.
00:18:47.000It is directly attempting to reach children.
00:19:16.000The reason they want that is because then they feel liberated.
00:19:19.000Because, after all, if all the societal strictures go away, then you feel accepted.
00:19:23.000You feel accepted by all the other selfish people who are mostly concerned with what they feel on the inside.
00:19:28.000Now with their obligations to others, now with the standards of morality that create a thriving society with social fabric and a sense of belonging, Then they feel amazing about themselves, but only if they can hijack your kids into feeling the same way about themselves that they feel about themselves.
00:19:46.000And we won't have any sense of social solidarity, except that we all hate the religious people who keep saying this thing about how there's standards of true and right behavior that are good and worth pursuing.
00:20:38.000There she is, the greatest of all doctors, Jill Biden.
00:20:42.000Not only can she heal a heart attack with an education degree, but also she is there to celebrate along with some of the most transgressive perverts in America.
00:20:51.000That is, who are attempting to create culture that will bleed down to your children.
00:20:58.000If the left can say, and a tribute to, you know, right-wing political figures, whatever viewpoints are held by whatever events they attend, when you have people like Joe Biden attending events where there's a full satanic performance, you have to wonder why this has become so acceptable for the first lady of the United States and Ersatz president, because again, the president of the United States is no longer sentient and she's got her hand on his hand signing bills, like Edith Wilson circa 1919.
00:21:25.000In just one second, we'll get to the broader attempt by our culture to indoctrinate your kids into particular ideological cults.
00:21:32.000First, it's been a rough few years for business.
00:21:35.000I don't think it's going to get any easier.
00:21:37.000Despite all the talk, the happy talk about the economy, as I say, I don't think that the economy is going to be radically improving anytime soon.
00:21:43.000In fact, I think it's probably likely to go somewhat the other way.
00:21:45.000If you're a business owner and you paid too much in taxes, shouldn't you get some of that money back?
00:21:49.000Here's the thing, a lot of people actually did this.
00:21:50.000During COVID, a lot of us paid taxes that you actually didn't need to pay and you might be able to claw some of that back if your business has five or more employees.
00:21:57.000and managed to survive COVID, you could be eligible to receive a payroll tax rebate of up to $26,000 per employee.
00:22:38.000If there is a cultural movement to hijack your kids, and it exists in pop culture, it exists in education, it exists in music, it exists in children's entertainment.
00:22:49.000There's a tweet that went out yesterday that I found particularly kind of evocative of what it is that so many on the left wish to achieve.
00:22:58.000This is a tweet that went out from a person named Kat Tenbarge.
00:23:02.000Kat Tenbarge is a self-proclaimed journalist.
00:23:32.000Parents teaching kids backward ideas about sex or not teaching them at all is how we ended up with all these problems.
00:23:38.000So question, what are the problems she's talking about?
00:23:41.000Really, which problems are we discussing here?
00:23:43.000Are we talking about Are we talking about problems of ignorance about pelvic floors, or are we really talking about problems of radically increased teen suicidal ideation, social contagions, and teens identifying as insane sexual and gender categories that do not even exist?
00:23:59.000Are we talking about a 40% out-of-wedlock birth rate in the United States?
00:24:04.000Are we talking about a crisis of loneliness and confusion among young people?
00:24:10.000That is a culture dedicated to those propositions.
00:24:11.000But the idea from our cultural betters is that you as a parent should be removed from a position of power in your own child's life.
00:24:18.000You should be removed from a position of teaching morality.
00:24:21.000There's a reason why left-wing moral theoreticians I've always suggested that the family needs to be broken.
00:24:28.000Religious community needs to be broken.
00:24:29.000The places where you normally imbibed your morality, the places that were the traditional sources of wisdom and knowledge handed down over the course of centuries, they needed to be broken so that the individual could be liberated.
00:24:38.000And by liberated, we mean chained to the animalistic side of ourselves and freed of any obligation.
00:24:44.000That's what we actually mean when we say liberated.
00:24:48.000This notion that the state should be the great teacher of you because the state is going to be amazing at teaching your kids about STDs.
00:24:58.000State advocates have crippled several generations of kids with their perverse morality, suggesting, of course, that sexual pleasure lies at the top of the hierarchical pyramid of values.
00:25:14.000You got people in the public school system saying that it is an obligation, an obligation to remove you from any level of moral standing with your kids.
00:25:22.000In fact, you may be a threat to your kids.
00:25:23.000This is what lies behind so many attempts by places like the state of California to basically suggest that if a kid goes into school and starts expressing gender confusion, kids should be socially transitioned at school and parents never told because parents are the threat.
00:25:46.000And it bleeds down to the view of history.
00:25:47.000Because remember, in order to erect a monument to the individual selfishness that the left wishes to pursue on a social level, what you have to do is you have to tear down the institutions that currently exist.
00:25:59.000Those institutions, as we see at the Grammys, include religion.
00:26:02.000As we see in that tweet, include the power of parents and family.
00:26:05.000And they also include a belief in your country.
00:26:08.000Because if all the social glues are dissolved, then we become a bunch of atomized individuals who are wandering around aimlessly and being obsessed with our own sense of personal sexual satisfaction.
00:26:20.000So one of the ties that binds us, one of the glues that holds us together, is a belief in American history, for example.
00:26:27.000If you were to go back to, say, 1950 or 1960, or to go into any small town community in the United States that has a level of social coherence, And cohesion?
00:26:36.000What they'll tell you is a few things hold them together.
00:26:40.000A sense of patriotism for the country.
00:26:43.000If people can dissolve all of those things at the childhood level, they can finally erect a scaffolding that they have wanted to erect for a very long time.
00:26:49.000A tower of Babel to the individual self.
00:26:52.000Part of that, of course, is indoctrinating your kids in a perverse view of American history.
00:26:55.000So, there's a clip that was going around over the weekend.
00:26:58.000That was shocking to those who have never really watched Disney Plus or looked at much of the content that is being promoted on Disney Plus.
00:27:07.000And there's a reason that we here at Daily Wire are dedicating $100 million over the next couple of years to produce children's content.
00:27:13.000It's coming out in very short order, apparently not fast enough.
00:27:16.000DW Kids is going to be a thing specifically because we wish to provide your kids a space where they can believe in traditional values and just learn about the world.
00:27:24.000Because what the left wants to do is prey on your kids and shove into their brains terrible ideas about the country, about morality, about religion, about all the institutions, the intermediate institutions that make life both secure and worth living.
00:27:39.000And so one of the shows that was doing this on Disney Plus is, of course, The Proud Family.
00:27:44.000Here is a clip from The Proud Family that was making the rounds over the weekend.
00:27:46.000It is just false history and nonsense, rage against America being taught to your small kids.
00:27:52.000This country was built on slavery, which means slaves built this country.
00:27:57.000Tilt this land from sea to sea to sea.
00:27:59.000First there was rice, tobacco, sugarcane.
00:28:01.000Then Whitney did his thing and Cotton became king.
00:28:03.000And we were its soldiers, four million strong, fighting for America's freedoms even though we remained America's slaves.
00:28:09.000Built this country, the descendants of slaves continue to be.
00:28:14.000And we, the descendants of slaves in America, have earned reparations for their suffering.
00:28:19.000And continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in the systemic prejudice, racism, and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.
00:28:41.000Keith and Mill, we made your families rich!
00:28:44.000From the Southern Plantation heirs, to the Northern Bankers, to the New England ship owners, the Founding Fathers, former Presidents, current Senators, the Illuminati, the New World Order, slaves built this country!
00:28:55.000We had Tubman, Turner, Frederick D, then they slayed Lincoln, freed the slaves, but slaves were men.
00:29:44.000This is always how it works, is that all this garbage starts at the highest level of critical race theory in our universities, then it bleeds down to the people who write your shows, and then it's your kids who are now learning this in their schools, in a dumbed-down version of the 1619 Project, or on The Proud Family on Disney Channel.
00:29:58.000First of all, the belief system that America was built on the back of slavery, as opposed to all other cultures ever.
00:30:04.000That every institution of the United States is infused with slavery.
00:30:10.000The belief that it's Southern wealth that generated American prosperity is also a lie.
00:30:14.000The South was an economic backwater compared to the North.
00:30:17.000Slavery is actually very bad for the economy, as it turns out, which is what the South found out during the Civil War and the North kicked the hell out of them.
00:30:23.000The belief system that people today are owed reparations for sins committed against their great, great, great, great, great grandparents And that every ill in American society today is attributable to slavery is an absurdity.
00:30:37.000And yet this is the crap that they are now mainlining into your kids' heads through TV and making your kids hate the country.
00:30:43.000I mean, I don't know how you emerge from that without your kid thinking our country is evil.
00:30:47.000That, of course, is the entire point of that little woke retelling of American history, straight from Nikole Hannah-Jones and Howard Zinn.
00:31:26.000She's the executive producer for Disney Television Animation, and she was caught on tape just a few months ago saying, quote, in my little pocket of proud family Disney TVA, the showrunners were super welcoming to my not at all secret gay agenda.
00:31:39.000Maybe it was that way in the past, but I guess something must have happened.
00:31:41.000All the momentum that I felt, that sense of, I don't have to be afraid to have these two characters kiss in the background.
00:31:46.000I was just, wherever I could, adding queerness.
00:32:40.000It means that in the moments where I actually can get sleep, I need to sleep.
00:32:44.000And that means I need the best mattress on planet Earth.
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00:33:01.000I've had my Helix Sleep Mattress for several years at this point.
00:33:31.000With Helix, better sleep starts right now.
00:33:33.000Also, folks, I've got a timely and important book to share with you today.
00:33:36.000New York Times best-selling author Heather MacDonald has teamed up with DW Books to bring you a powerful new book, When Race Trumps Merit, How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, relevant to a lot of what we're talking about today.
00:33:50.000Do you care about the future of our society and the institutions that actually shape it?
00:33:53.000This book is for you because there are people out there We want to destroy all of those things.
00:33:57.000When race trumps merit is the name of the book.
00:33:59.000In it, Heather exposes the dangerous consequences of prioritizing race over merit in all aspects of society.
00:34:05.000From science, to music, to law enforcement, our institutions are being eroded and destroyed in the name of equity.
00:34:09.000The book takes a hard look at the impact of the left's pursuit of equity and how it's undermining meritocracy and putting our society at risk.
00:34:14.000Heather provides a clear and sobering analysis on what is happening and what we can expect if we don't actually act.
00:34:20.000Heather's done amazing work for years, debunking many of the myths that the left tries to pervade about systemic racism in the United States.
00:34:26.000If you're interested in understanding the threats of Western civilization and fighting back, do not miss this essential book, When Race Trumps Merit.
00:34:33.000You can pre-order your copy today at Amazon or wherever books are sold.
00:34:37.000Also, yesterday, I released a brand new episode of my Sunday special.
00:34:40.000It features a very special guest, Anna Kasparian.
00:34:42.000Anna is a really nice person and a fascinating person.
00:34:45.000She and I disagree on nearly everything from health care reform and labor unions to policies that have been a disaster for the state of California.
00:34:55.000For Democrats, stop focusing on scaring people about the scary right-wing candidates and offer them real solutions that you're going to fight for.
00:35:06.000I think that's the only long-lasting winning strategy for Democrats.
00:35:12.000No, because they're captured by the money.
00:35:18.000This episode is now available to watch on Daily Wire Plus or listen to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:35:25.000Well, speaking of the indoctrination of our kids, obviously it's not just happening via The Proud Family on Disney Plus, although that is one reason why we've launched DW Kids.
00:35:32.000That programming will be available in shorter.
00:35:34.000It's just a great reason why you should subscribe at dailywireplus.com right now so that You can actually give your kids material that doesn't make them hate their country, or hate their family, or hate their religion, and all of the rest.
00:35:45.000But it's also happening, obviously, in our institutions of higher learning.
00:35:48.000It's part of a broader campaign to dissolve the societal glue that binds us together.
00:35:53.000One of the lead figures in that is, of course, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the wildly over-celebrated pseudo-intellectual who put together the 1619 Project, a pack of lies predicated on the idea that every institution in American society is essentially racist and white supremacist.
00:36:07.000Over the weekend, she was campaigning again for the 1619 Project because Hulu has gotten its institutional power behind this thing.
00:36:13.000Again, remember, all the arbiters of culture are on the side of the people who like satanic celebrations at the Grammys.
00:36:19.000I mean, that's what's happening right here.
00:36:21.000So here, Hulu, they've dedicated presumably tens of millions of dollars to making a lie-filled project like the 1619 Project, promoted by a huckster like Nikole Hannah-Jones.
00:36:30.000Here she was promoting this thing on another huckster network, MSNBC.
00:37:01.000suggested that to oppose critical race theory, which again is the theory that that she essentially purveys in dumbed down fashion, that is a propaganda campaign because true American history is a story of suffering and evil.
00:37:47.000Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars.
00:37:50.000He was on Fox News debunking the 1619 Project over the weekend.
00:37:54.000Overall, your thought of the book and the Oprah-sponsored series?
00:37:58.000Well, the book is a shameless compilation of misstatements, misrepresentations of the American past.
00:38:07.000Like any other historian, I'm in favor of teaching African-American history, but I would like to see it taught accurately and well.
00:38:17.000All of this bleeds down into actual policy as well.
00:38:20.000We are swimming in an ocean of left-wing ideology that promotes the dissolution of all the ties that bind us together, obviously.
00:38:28.000And what that means is that even basic standards of societal decency have been undermined.
00:38:32.000One of the big projects, for example, of the Biden administration, this is in the very early days of the Biden administration, is in June of 2021, the Biden administration announced that they would like to redo how school discipline is done, to take an example.
00:38:43.000Well, it turns out that a disproportionate number of kids who are subjected to school discipline, like being suspended or expelled, are black.
00:38:50.000The reason for that is because unfortunately a disproportionate number of kids who are misbehaving in class in ways that require them to be removed from the classroom are black.
00:38:58.000But the Department of Education was not willing to say that.
00:39:01.000They didn't even establish any sort of data baseline.
00:39:03.000Instead the idea was that if there's any disparity between white suspension rates and black suspension rates, well then It must be systemic racism in the mold of Nicole Hannah-Jones or Ibram X. Kendi.
00:39:12.000Anytime there is a discrepancy, anytime there's a disparity, that means there has been some sort of systemic discrimination.
00:39:17.000So all the way back in June of 2021, the agency announced that it planned to seek public comment on discipline in school climate and quote, how best to support and build schools capacity to promote positive, inclusive, safe and supportive school climates in a non-discriminatory manner.
00:39:31.000Again, the idea being that the only way to end discrimination in schools is to make sure that kids don't get expelled or suspended anymore.
00:39:41.000And what this has led to is an artificial attempt to close racial gaps in suspensions and reduce the use of suspensions in general over the course of the last couple of years.
00:39:53.000The result has been in many cases that you have kids who are acting horribly in class and who are ruining the educational experience for pretty much everybody else.
00:40:02.000And even critics of the current disparities will acknowledge that there is no data, like they've not even bothered to gather data on whether the discrepancy is due to a difference in behavior.
00:40:12.000Brookings Institute had a piece over the weekend talking about it, said, despite positive changes, racial disproportionality in school discipline persists.
00:40:19.000Why is it so hard to close such gaps? What are we missing?
00:40:21.000A close look at research articles and policy debates on this topic suggests researchers and policy makers have been almost exclusively focusing on the end result of discipline suspensions.
00:40:29.000But there's been no attention given to referral and reporting processes.
00:40:34.000They say that the data don't even include, like they don't bother to include, how the kids are actually behaving before they are suspended.
00:40:47.000Quote, it is challenging to tease out the mechanism because researchers almost never observe the underlying student behavior of an infraction.
00:40:54.000Well, then how can you tell whether it's disparity or discrimination?
00:40:59.000The reason this has real-world consequences, of course, is because this now bleeds over into media coverage of situations in which school discipline is absolutely necessary.
00:41:06.000So there was a video that was going around over the weekend, and it is a shocking video that was going around over the weekend, and it showed two kids who are black, they're boys, and they're beating the living hell, I mean really beating the living hell, apparently out of a brother and a sister in Homestead, Florida.
00:41:27.000Here's a bit of the video, it's really disturbing.
00:41:48.000Now, the reason that I bring this up is because there are media headlines that came out.
00:41:52.000They were very reticent to talk about the race of the people who were involved.
00:41:56.000Whereas, obviously, if the races were reversed, then that would be a major news story.
00:41:59.000In fact, there was one particular news story that was making the rounds on the internet, in which they used a stock photo of a kid punching another kid, and the kid punching the other kid was white.
00:42:07.000According to the WSVN network in South Miami-Dade, Florida, disturbing videos of a school bus beating shows two children, who are brother and sister, being pounded by their peers, prompting the victim's mother to take action.
00:42:18.000In the bus riding beating, the 9-year-old girl can be seen bent down in her seat as a teen stood over her and delivered a barrage of blows.
00:42:24.000Another video showed her 10-year-old brother being beaten while on the same school bus.
00:42:27.000The girl suffered bruises on her head, back, and shoulders, leaving her parents fuming and full of questions about how this could have happened to their children.
00:42:34.000The victim's father said, at the same time my daughter was getting beaten, the same thing was happening to my son on the other side of the bus.
00:42:39.000The parents said this is not the first time their daughter and son have been targeted.
00:42:42.000They said they've been bullied at school since they started in January.
00:42:47.000The children's mother said, I've been to the school.
00:42:48.000I've spoken with counselors, principals, assistants, other principals.
00:42:52.000An assistant principal wrote us and she said, I think it's time you take your kids out of the school.
00:42:55.000Our kids aren't the problem, said the kid's father.
00:43:50.000This is a perfectly obvious thing to do.
00:43:52.000And you'll also recall at the time, like on Friday, there are a bunch of people who emerged from the left to say, no, we can't shoot it down.
00:43:58.000I mean, if Joe Biden isn't shooting it down, that's because he's a very wise man.
00:44:00.000And as a very wise man, he wouldn't shoot down the balloon.
00:44:04.000So they brought out retired General Wesley Clark, for example, on Friday.
00:44:07.000Say, we don't want to destroy the balloon.
00:44:23.000So yes, there was some concern about the bring it down.
00:44:25.000But I think also, we want to make sure when we bring it down, we bring it down the right way.
00:44:30.000And we've got the chance to exploit what's there.
00:44:34.000So we don't want to just smash everything and have nothing but pieces of chips and transistors there.
00:44:40.000What we want is to take it down in such a way we can go out and grab it, look at what's in there.
00:44:46.000Maybe there's something to learn from it.
00:44:50.000Yeah, and the best way to do that is to drop it into the ocean, as it turns out.
00:44:54.000James Clapper, the pathetic former head of the CIA, he says, you know, I'm inclined to believe the Chinese when they say that this balloon just wandered.
00:45:00.000It was a weather balloon that wandered.
00:45:11.000So what kind of conversations are happening right now at the Pentagon involving U.S.
00:45:16.000intelligence agencies as well in the White House?
00:45:20.000Well, I think for sure the discussion, one item of interest to me, which I'm sure is under discussion, is exactly what is the sensor suite on this balloon?
00:45:34.000I'm kind of inclined to believe the Chinese that this thing, this errant, had wandered off course.
00:45:43.000I think they haven't been entirely forthcoming with what's on it in the way of the sensor suite.
00:45:49.000Oh, but he believes them that it just sort of, you know, drifted off course.
00:46:44.000Flying over several sensitive military sites, US officials tell NBC News they took action to weaken China's surveillance capabilities.
00:46:51.000So this obviously created a lot of opportunities for fantastic memes.
00:46:56.000Elon Musk tweeted out, one such meme is a, for those who can't see it, it is a graphic of the movie Up with the giant cluster of balloons in the house and then a giant explosion coming through the balloons.
00:47:10.000My personal favorite meme to emerge from this was a tweet from the account ChineseSpyBalloon, quote, I have information that will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton.
00:47:18.000That joke's never going to get old to me.
00:47:23.000Anyway, the shift in time is really fascinating because again, on Friday it was like, why would you tell Joe Biden that he's a coward for not shooting down the balloon?
00:47:31.000We're not going to shoot down the balloon.
00:47:33.000Only a fool would want to shoot down the balloon.
00:47:36.000And then on Saturday, Joe Biden emerges like a groundhog from his hidey hole to explain that he actually gave the order to shoot it down on Wednesday.
00:48:11.000So we went from, how dare you imply that Joe Biden is a coward for not shooting it down, to dark Brandon shot down the balloon in the course of like 24 hours.
00:48:38.000There's no way the president gave an order on Wednesday to shoot the thing down and then just sat around for five days or four days waiting for this thing to drift all the way over every sensitive military installation in the United States and then across the water.
00:48:59.000I hope in the future we make clear to China that This kind of incident cannot happen again, and it will not happen again.
00:49:09.000That in the future, if we see that kind of balloon, we are going to, if they don't take action to prevent that balloon from entering our airspace, that we will indeed shoot it down much earlier than we did this time around.
00:49:24.000And I think if I have you straight, you're saying that you think this should have been shot down perhaps over Montana, something like that, maybe over a sparsely populated area.
00:49:33.000That's where I think before it crossed over the entire, almost the entire continental US.
00:49:39.000Yeah, that bothered me that it was allowed to transverse the entire country.
00:49:52.000By the way, we never would have found out about this if it had not been perfectly obvious a giant balloon was hovering over the United States, run by the Chinese Wizard of Oz or something, in Reed Point, Montana.
00:50:03.000And then it went all the way across the United States, like through Missouri, and then across North Carolina, and then into South Carolina, and then finally we shoot it over the water.
00:50:12.000And Joe Biden's like, his fans are like, man, this guy's a genius.
00:51:21.000And here is what they said, quote, PRC government surveillance balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the prior administration, and once that we know of at the beginning of this administration, but never for this duration of time.
00:51:32.000We spoke directly with Chinese officials through multiple channels, but rather than address their intrusion into our airspace, the PRC put out an explanation that lacked any credibility.
00:51:40.000The PRC has claimed publicly the high altitude balloon operating above the United States is a weather balloon that was blown off course.
00:51:47.000This surveillance balloon purposefully traversed the United States and Canada.
00:51:50.000We are confident it was seeking to monitor sensitive military sites.
00:51:53.000Its route over the United States near many potential sensitive sites contradicts the PRC government's explanation that it was a weather balloon.
00:52:04.000They dropped this quote-unquote piece of news, which is that all these weather balloons have been traversing American airspace for a long time.
00:52:11.000The reason they dropped that, of course, is to take the focus off of Joe Biden, because if Joe Biden is uniquely incapable of shooting down a damned balloon, then that's a problem for him.
00:52:20.000So instead, it's, well, you know, it happened under Trump, too.
00:52:22.000It happened under Trump, and this became a talking point for the media.
00:52:39.000Because what happened is these weather balloons, or these Chinese spy satellite balloons, they basically traversed so quickly and in such small fashion that it never even made it up the chain.
00:52:49.000That's not the same thing as a balloon sitting and traversing the entire continental United States over the course of a week.
00:53:08.000A Trump administration national security official said, I'm not aware of a single civilian national security leader from the Trump administration who even heard of this.
00:53:16.000So the Defense Department is trying to cover for Joe Biden by demanding that we see a similarity between incidents that were so unserious they were never reported up chain.
00:53:25.000And a giant Chinese spy balloon flying across the entirety of the United States.
00:53:32.000No, guys, no, but it just shows you the quote unquote deep state, the number of career employees and executive branch agencies who are out there defending people like Joe Biden.
00:53:44.000And this became the talking point of media.
00:53:47.000The representative Michael Waltz, a House Armed Services Committee member, tweeted on Sunday, the Pentagon had informed him several Chinese balloon incidents had happened in the past few years, including over Florida.
00:53:56.000According to several Trump administration national security officials, they were never even informed of these intrusions by the Pentagon.
00:54:01.000The only other similar time an airship appeared with Biden in the White House was last February near Hawaii.
00:54:07.000But apparently these events were not even discovered in real time.
00:54:10.000A senior administration official said the events went undetected.
00:54:29.000How is that in any way similar to Joe Biden knows there is a giant spy balloon hovering above the United States for days at a time, does nothing and then shoots it down when it gets over the water?
00:54:39.000It's not the same thing at all, but it gave the media their talking point.
00:54:47.000By the way, what exactly are these spy balloons doing?
00:54:51.000Well, it turns out that a few years ago, the United States military was conducting wide area surveillance tests across six Midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons.
00:55:00.000Apparently, what they do is they essentially provide real-time technology that shows in granular detail, like better than a space satellite, what exactly is happening on the ground.
00:55:11.000And so that's exactly what China was doing right here.
00:55:14.000Pete Buttigieg was, of course, deployed to talk about this.
00:55:17.000Again, I'm not sure why is Pete Buttigieg the Secretary of Transportation?
00:55:21.000The dude can't even get the railroads running on time.
00:55:25.000And yet, he is on national TV talking about a Chinese balloon.
00:55:29.000Shouldn't it be someone from the Defense Department?
00:55:30.000Like, doesn't anyone work at this administration?
00:55:42.000Is it acceptable that there were eight days that the spy balloon was over the United States, then Canada, then again over the United States, from Idaho, Montana, all the way through to the Carolinas for day after day?
00:56:03.000That's something that was done based on assessment of the risks, making sure that there was no risk that outweighed the risks in terms of any damage that would come.
00:56:32.000I do know that when the President gave the order to have this handled, the military gauged the different risks and the different benefits of different approaches, made the decisions that they did, brought this thing down without incident.
00:56:44.000Right, but the presumption has got to be that the Chinese were able to gather intelligence hovering over the United States for day after day, especially over some of these sensitive sites.
00:56:52.000I'm sure there's a similar presumption about what spy satellites do.
00:57:06.000It's about the president made a cowardly move to allow this thing to float all over the entire United States for like a week.
00:57:13.000You can try to make these tepid defenses, but it just isn't going to work.
00:57:17.000Now the Chinese, for their part, they're acting all offended that we shot down their dumb balloon.
00:57:21.000According to ABC, China has expressed its strong dissatisfaction and protest against Washington's decision to shoot down its balloon, accusing it of overreacting and seriously violating international practice.
00:57:31.000I didn't realize that shooting down spy balloons is now a violation of international practice.
00:57:36.000China keeps lying and saying that it's a civilian weather aircraft that blew off course.
00:57:43.000But all of this underscores the fact that our relationship with China is very fraught, that China is incredibly aggressive, and that, honestly, they kind of made the president look like a fool here.
00:57:53.000I understand that everybody is celebrating that F-22 took down a balloon.
00:57:55.000It doesn't seem like a fair competition, to be quite honest with you.
00:57:58.000An F-22 should be able to take down a balloon.
00:58:01.000But the real question is, why was an F-22 not deployed earlier to take down the balloon?
00:58:06.000Before any of this happened and the answer, of course, is that Joe Biden is a weakling.
00:58:10.000He's a weakling and he did not make a call.
00:58:13.000And then the Pentagon said, well, we've got to wait for this thing to cross across 83 states and get all the way across the country and then take a right in Florida and move all the way back down across the Gulf of Mexico.
00:58:23.000And like we need basically the Chinese need to see every single house in the United States before we shoot this thing down for safety.
00:58:29.000I really don't think that's how this thing went.
00:58:32.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:58:37.000So if you wish to understand the relationship between China and the United States, there's a very good book by a foreign policy scholar named Elizabeth Economy.
00:58:45.000People ask me for book recommendations all the time.
00:58:47.000This is, I think, the best book that I've read recently on what Xi Jinping is doing in China.
00:58:53.000She makes the case that, essentially, Xi is pursuing a reassertion of the state in Chinese political and economic life at home and a more ambitious and expansive role for China abroad, exercising, quote, new levers of influence and power that others will have to learn to exploit and counter to protect and advance their own interests.
00:59:09.000And she also makes the case that China has taken advantage of the openness of the United States and other market-based liberal democracies to further its economic interests and advance its political and cultural influence.
00:59:18.000The threat of China is very, very real.
00:59:20.000The fact that they are internally weak is actually more of a threat in many ways.
00:59:23.000If they were internally strong, they might be able to sit there and just wait for time to take care of the problem.
00:59:26.000The problem is that Xi Jinping has actually weakened his country economically, and that means he's going to have to get more aggressive on the foreign front.
00:59:32.000And that is something that we should be watching out for.
00:59:35.000With China being as aggressive as they are, We need to be radically increasing our military buildup, like, right now.
00:59:42.000Because most of the areas that are most vulnerable happen to be geographically very, very close to China, and here I'm speaking specifically about Taiwan.
00:59:49.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
01:00:07.000I think we should go back to doing it the way that George Washington did.
01:00:10.000And George Washington should just send, the president should just send a letter to the Congress and be like, everything's fine.
01:00:16.000And then we should all move on with our lives.
01:00:19.000But instead we get this ridiculous Royal spectacle of the president descending amid the cheering legislators, which of course completely reverses the constitutional bargain.
01:00:28.000The constitutional bargain is that the legislature is supposed to be the powerful branch of government and the president is supposed to be secondary.
01:00:32.000That's why Article 1 of the Constitution, I'm now educating Joe Biden's judicial picks.
01:02:07.000They say it was really, really good last month, but it obviously has been slowing pretty significantly since the end of the pandemic.
01:02:16.000What's more important is this particular job growth chart.
01:02:19.000So there is a job growth chart showing where we would be if we had actually kept up with the job growth that was happening in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic.
01:02:32.000If you look at this chart what you see is a steady upward line in terms of adjusted employment and it's going up it's going up and then we hit the pandemic and it drops off a cliff.
01:02:41.000It drops from essentially 155 million people employed down to about 130 million people employed.
01:02:56.000Instead, it sort of stops short and then it trails the line by a wide gap.
01:03:00.000In other words, we have now finally reached the number of jobs that we had before the pandemic that are filled, but we're not even remotely close to where we would have been if we just had a natural continuation of economic growth without the pandemic.
01:03:13.000And the reason for that, as you can see, the trajectory absolutely changes.
01:03:18.000As Joe Biden takes office in 2021, you can see the trajectory move from what is a very sharp uptick to a much more gradual uptick in job creation.
01:03:26.000We're about to see some economic stagnation.
01:03:29.000The inflation problem is not yet done.
01:03:31.000As the Wall Street Journal observes, recent readings on wages and prices have markets increasingly optimistic that inflation can be brought down without a recession.
01:03:38.000The Federal Reserve would love to agree, but it can't.
01:03:40.000In its quarter percentage point rate increase on Wednesday, the accompanying statement and Chair Jerome Powell's press conference, the central bank made it clear its views had not changed.
01:03:47.000Inflation is still too high and will not return to its 2% target without higher interest rates and a weaker labor market.
01:03:51.000So all that sort of happy talk that you're going to see over the State of the Union, Beto Biden's doing an amazing job, and it's just great.
01:03:58.000It's all gonna be butterflies and rainbows.
01:04:01.000That is not what the markets are saying right now.
01:04:03.000And if they are, it's because, believe it or not, while there is weak market sufficiency, meaning like generalized knowledge in the markets, is gonna beat anybody who's sort of playing games.
01:04:14.000The reality is that right now people are trying to read tea leaves and those tea leaves are not being read properly.
01:04:19.000We're about to enter a period of economic stagnation.
01:04:22.000Put it on the record now, I said this a year and a half ago.
01:04:25.000is that inflation was not going to be the long-term problem for the United States.
01:04:27.000Economic stagnation was going to be the long-term problem for the United States.
01:04:31.000So take all of the happy talk you're going to get over the next couple of days with a grain of salt.
01:04:45.000He's the professor who sent a bunch of ridiculous fake headlines to various university journals and they printed them all because the universities are nuts.
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