The Ben Shapiro Show - Is Secession Upon Us? | Ep. 1155

00:00:00.000 Rush Limbaugh sets off fireworks when he suggests secession might be inevitable.

00:00:04.000 106 House Republicans backed Texas's election 2020 lawsuit.

00:00:07.000 And the media finally pay attention to Hunter Biden.

00:00:09.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

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

00:00:11.000 This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

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00:00:23.000 Slash Ben, we'll get to all of the news in just one moment.

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00:01:43.000 Alrighty, so.

00:01:44.000 The world of commentary exploded yesterday.

00:01:47.000 Well, because Rush Limbaugh on his show was talking about the fact that we have a massive culture gap in the country.

00:01:47.000 Why?

00:01:52.000 Now, this is obviously, obviously true.

00:01:54.000 It is obviously true that there is a massive culture gap between the left and the right.

00:01:57.000 It is also obviously true that there are many members of the radical left Who have such a bizarre vision of the United States that it is mutually exclusive with traditional visions of how the United States is supposed to work.

00:02:07.000 And if you have a country where people have fundamentally different conceptions of words like freedom and justice, where you have completely different notions of what constitutes virtue and vice, It's going to be very difficult for those people to live together.

00:02:20.000 The only way that you can have people live together who disagree about these sorts of things is to basically say that the government should not be cramming down its particular vision on anybody.

00:02:28.000 That the government should be small.

00:02:29.000 This was one of the things that the founders knew well.

00:02:31.000 They realized that there were many states.

00:02:33.000 The states live differently.

00:02:34.000 People in the localities within those states live differently.

00:02:36.000 And therefore, an overarching, very powerful federal government would actually be more likely to fracture than the opposite.

00:02:41.000 They knew this because this is exactly what had happened with Great Britain.

00:02:43.000 Because Great Britain had basically said, we're going to rule from above.

00:02:46.000 And the American colonies had said, we live a different lifestyle.

00:02:48.000 We are thousands of miles away from you, and we don't even know about your decisions, and we don't have representation, so we're out.

00:02:57.000 And so the founders knew this.

00:02:58.000 The founders recognized that in a world where people have vast disagreements, the only way that you're going to get them to agree to remain in union with one another is if you do not cram down too many things upon them.

00:03:09.000 The founders also recognized that there had to be certain baseline levels of agreement on things like virtue and vice.

00:03:15.000 And this is why John Adams famously suggested that the Constitution of the United States assumed a population that lived within certain moral bounds and certain moral strictures.

00:03:24.000 Because he said, if you have a non-virtuous people, it will rush right through the constitutional boundaries like a whale through the cords of a net.

00:03:32.000 And so all of this has been long agreed upon.

00:03:33.000 There's nothing controversial about the idea that if we have nothing in common, things are sort of going to fall apart.

00:03:37.000 This is something that Rush Limbaugh mentioned yesterday.

00:03:39.000 And until five seconds ago, the media would have agreed.

00:03:42.000 Until five seconds ago, the media would have said, look at this terrible, terrible country with Donald Trump.

00:03:47.000 As the head of it.

00:03:48.000 Can we live in peace and harmony with these people?

00:03:51.000 No, we can't live in peace and harmony with these people.

00:03:53.000 We're going to have to break apart.

00:03:54.000 I mean, this whole thing is just falling apart.

00:03:56.000 Then they believe that Joe Biden was elected and suddenly it's unity time again.

00:03:59.000 And this is what the media always do.

00:04:00.000 They suggest that unity is only to be had when their perspective is dominant.

00:04:04.000 When they win, then we are supposed to be unified.

00:04:06.000 When they lose, then we are supposed to fall apart.

00:04:10.000 Now, there are many of us who are pointing out during the first term of Trump that this thing was falling apart, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are running the show, because there are fundamental disagreements in the United States over what the United States represents, ought to represent, what our vision ought to be for the future.

00:04:23.000 Is it a vision of liberty, or is it a vision of forced equality?

00:04:27.000 From the top down.

00:04:28.000 So Rush mentions this yesterday, and of course the world sets aflame because the idea is that Rush is very bad for saying this.

00:04:34.000 Now, they do this every time an election is over and a Democrat appears to have won.

00:04:38.000 And back in 2008, after Barack Obama won, Rush said he hoped that Obama failed.

00:04:43.000 He didn't mean that he hoped that Barack Obama tried to do good things and failed.

00:04:46.000 He said what he meant was, and it was very obvious what he meant at the time, he meant that he hoped that Barack Obama's progressive agenda was a failure because he did not want to see that progressive agenda enacted on the United States, right?

00:04:56.000 It was very obvious what he was saying.

00:04:57.000 The media decided to go nuts anyway.

00:04:59.000 Well, you know, eight, four, what is it, 12 years later?

00:05:02.000 12 years later, Rush Limbaugh says something fairly similar here, which is, the country seems to be falling apart.

00:05:07.000 That is perfectly obvious.

00:05:09.000 Here was Rush yesterday.

00:05:11.000 I actually think that we're trending toward secession.

00:05:18.000 I know that there is a sizable and growing sentiment for people who believe that that is where we're headed whether we want to or not.

00:05:30.000 Whether we want to go there or not.

00:05:31.000 I myself haven't made up my mind.

00:05:34.000 I still haven't.

00:05:36.000 Given up the idea that we are the majority and that all we have to do is find a way to unite and win.

00:05:45.000 The media went crazy over this because how dare Rush Limbaugh in a time of glorious democratic victory suggest that the country is kind of falling apart?

00:05:53.000 Well, the problem is that one half of the media was doing that.

00:05:55.000 And meanwhile, half the left is like, yeah, you know what?

00:05:57.000 You're right.

00:05:58.000 We should go our separate ways.

00:05:59.000 So Amy Siskind, Who is a liberal commentator, obviously. 0.95

00:06:03.000 She tweeted out a graphic from circa about 2004 when members of the left were very, very angry about George W. Bush winning reelection.

00:06:12.000 And what this graphic was is it showed Alaska in red and most of the Midwest in red, with the exception of like Illinois and Michigan.

00:06:19.000 and I believe Wisconsin there, and virtually all of the rest of the country is in red.

00:06:25.000 It's like the Northeast and the West Coast and the Midwestern states that voted for John Kerry, and then the rest of the country is red. And the suggestion was that all of the blue states would join with Canada, and all of the red states would become quote unquote Jesusland. It would be the United States of Canada and Jesusland. That was the ridiculous suggestion that was being put forth by folks on the left as early as 2004, which is that these differences are irreconcilable.

00:06:49.000 Now, I gotta tell you, the differences of 2004 look pasty in comparison to the differences that we currently hold in the United States. 0.83

00:06:56.000 We have a huge percentage of the population of the country that apparently believes that the country is systemically racist, and unfixably so.

00:07:02.000 I believe that government can solve all of your problems from the top down.

00:07:05.000 All that is required is sufficient willpower to do so.

00:07:07.000 And I believe the Constitution ought to be put completely aside in order to make all of this happen.

00:07:13.000 But to pretend that it is not the left's fevered hatred for folks on the right that has really driven so much of the sort of secession talk is to ignore who is in control of the institutions of culture.

00:07:25.000 We know who's in control of the institutions of culture.

00:07:27.000 We know who's in control in Hollywood.

00:07:29.000 We know that in Hollywood, it is people on the left who are in control, and they wish to purvey a particular view of the world.

00:07:33.000 And they wish for you to buy this particular view of the world, and if you do not, then you are going to be castigated in Hollywood as a backward redneck. 0.57

00:07:42.000 We know that the folks who are in charge of the media have one particular view of themselves and their own viewpoint, and they believe they are objectively right.

00:07:48.000 And if you disagree with them, you are objectively wrong.

00:07:50.000 And therefore, you ought to be cast out of the bounds of polite society.

00:07:53.000 The folks in the university system have created their own little religion of wokeism, where you cannot work.

00:07:58.000 You cannot work unless you believe in the fundamental tenets of quote-unquote social justice warrior nonsense.

00:08:04.000 The social justice movement is predicated on a certain level of post-modernist philosophy that suggests there is no such thing as objective truth or objective right, but there is such a thing as objective identity, and we can base our viewpoint on whether your objective identity Meaning your race, or your ethnicity, or your sexuality, whether these things are victimized in the United States.

00:08:24.000 And if you don't abide by that particular viewpoint, well then, you'll be thrown out of the academy.

00:08:29.000 The institutions are controlled by the left.

00:08:31.000 The only way that the right has fought back, really, has been in the world of politics, winning the occasional vote.

00:08:36.000 Winning the House in 2010, winning the Senate in 2014, winning the presidency in 2016.

00:08:42.000 So occasionally the right fights back, but they don't fight back in the realm of culture.

00:08:42.000 Right.

00:08:45.000 And as long as the culture continues to polarize, so long as you turn on the TV and all you get is one side of the political aisle railing at you day in and day out, it's going to feel more and more as though we're going to have to pull apart.

00:08:57.000 The founders knew this.

00:08:57.000 This is nothing new.

00:08:59.000 And people today know it.

00:09:00.000 So to pretend that we would have unity but for people like Rush Limbaugh or people on the right is to really suggest that we would have unity if you would just agree with us.

00:09:10.000 Now listen, I don't think folks on the left have to agree with me in order for us to have a baseline level of unity so we can move forward as a country.

00:09:15.000 I think we can disagree on tax rights.

00:09:16.000 We can fight over tax rights.

00:09:18.000 I think we can disagree on certain social issues.

00:09:21.000 And I think that that's Totally within the bounds of us still being the American family.

00:09:25.000 I think once you get to the point where you believe the Constitution ought to be overthrown in favor of an administrative state ruled from above by unelected officials who can interfere in every area of individual rights, well, now you're talking about something different.

00:09:38.000 And to sort of gloss over these philosophical differences, simply because you think Joe Biden was elected, demonstrates the agenda of so many in the media making an issue over what Rush said yesterday.

00:09:48.000 In a second, we'll get to Barack Obama, who, again, has been pasting over these issues.

00:09:51.000 Barack Obama is a seminal figure in the tearing apart of the country.

00:09:54.000 And if you want to watch gaslighting in real time, all you have to do is watch Barack Obama's book tour, because the media have declared that he is, in fact, a unifying figure.

00:10:00.000 Again, anytime a Democrat wins, according to the media, that means he's a unifying figure.

00:10:04.000 Anytime a Republican wins, that means the country is on the brink of falling apart.

00:10:08.000 For me, the question is not who wins and who loses elections.

00:10:12.000 The question is what values are being promulgated and how much do those values cast an entire other side of the political aisle out of the family of Americans.

00:10:20.000 Wish everybody else out into the cornfield.

00:10:22.000 We'll get to this in one second.

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00:11:43.000 Okay, so...

00:11:44.000 Barack Obama is a good indicator of where the media stand on this whole should America fall apart or not thing.

00:11:49.000 So Barack Obama was great at one thing, and that was lying about his actual philosophy.

00:11:55.000 So what he did, over and over and over, is he suggested that he liked the Declaration and he liked the Constitution, he just didn't like anything about the Declaration and the Constitution.

00:12:01.000 So he would say things.

00:12:03.000 Like, the Declaration and Constitution signify who we are, and then he would immediately cut back directly against the philosophy of the Declaration and the Constitution. 0.79

00:12:11.000 He would suggest that we're not black Americans and white Americans, we're all Americans, and then he would say that Cambridge police officers acted stupidly, and that America had racism in its DNA, and all the rest of the sort of stuff. 0.64

00:12:20.000 So Barack Obama is a very, very divisive guy. 0.67

00:12:22.000 The media continued to try to paint him as a unifying figure, because again, in the view of the media, their view is unifying, any other view is divisive.

00:12:29.000 So here's Barack Obama the other night suggesting that the only reason conservatives didn't love him was Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

00:12:37.000 I ended up getting enormous support in these pretty conservative, rural, largely white communities when I was a senator.

00:12:45.000 And that success was repeated when I Ran for president in the first race in Iowa.

00:12:52.000 By my second year in office, I'm not sure if I could make that same connection because now those same people Are filtering me through Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and an entire conservative media infrastructure that was characterizing me in a way that suggested I looked down on those folks or I had nothing in common with them.

00:13:17.000 Suggested?

00:13:18.000 You did look down on those folks.

00:13:19.000 You said in 2008 that those folks were bitter clingers who cling to God and guns and xenophobia.

00:13:24.000 Suggested?

00:13:25.000 Suggested?

00:13:27.000 No, the big problem is that conservative media was telling the truth about Barack Obama, and he didn't like that.

00:13:30.000 He liked it better when the media were simply lying about Barack Obama and his agenda.

00:13:35.000 And when people talk about the separation of the country, you have to understand that the media acting as a filter for Democrats may help the Democrats win, but it is not going to unify the country in any serious way.

00:13:46.000 It's just a way of pasting over serious differences in the body politic in order to achieve leftist victory.

00:13:51.000 That is what the media are doing every single day.

00:13:53.000 And by the way, the members of the media, if they were forced to the choice right now, they don't disagree with Amy Siskind.

00:13:58.000 They look at red states with absolute scorn.

00:14:00.000 They look at people who live in the red states with absolute scorn.

00:14:03.000 I went to law school with a lot of these folks.

00:14:05.000 They look at the people who don't live in the big cities and they look at them like they are hicks and like they are rednecks. 1.00

00:14:10.000 They look at religious people in particular as though they are stupid and backward. 1.00

00:14:13.000 They believe that their sort of secular worldview ought to take dominance and predominance over religious worldviews. 1.00

00:14:21.000 They are some of the least tolerant people I know.

00:14:23.000 And I have lived in blue areas my entire life until the last two months.

00:14:27.000 Literally my entire life.

00:14:28.000 I spent my entire life in L.A.

00:14:29.000 and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

00:14:31.000 And I can tell you that the notion that folks like Barack Obama do not look down on the so-called backward rednecks in the middle of the country is a lie. 1.00

00:14:40.000 They do look down on those people.

00:14:41.000 They believe those people's values are wrong.

00:14:43.000 This is why Hillary Clinton said that people in America were going to have to change their own religious values in order to get in touch with the times.

00:14:50.000 You think that doesn't pull apart the country?

00:14:52.000 It does pull apart the country.

00:14:53.000 Okay, now, this brings us to a larger point, okay?

00:14:56.000 And the larger point is this.

00:14:57.000 If we wish to share a country, we are going to have to accept that there are limits to how much you get to interfere in somebody else's life.

00:15:04.000 And what this means is we ought to want to maintain a principle, which is that states ought not interfere with other states.

00:15:10.000 If you actually want to share a country, maybe you don't want to share a country.

00:15:12.000 Maybe you want the country to fall apart if you're on the left.

00:15:14.000 Or maybe you're on the right and you say, OK, well, you know what?

00:15:16.000 We're never going to win this battle.

00:15:17.000 The battle's over, so I give up.

00:15:18.000 So fine, let California go its own way.

00:15:20.000 Let New York go its own way.

00:15:20.000 Let Massachusetts go its own way.

00:15:22.000 And we're done here.

00:15:23.000 OK, well, if that's your proposal, then make a proposal.

00:15:25.000 But if you believe that the country ought to stick together or if you believe that there is a silent majority that has been forced into silence, then one thing that you should definitely want to make sure of is that the folks in California and New York don't get to run things in Texas.

00:15:37.000 You want to make sure that the federal government doesn't get to dictate procedure in terms of law with regard to Texas or Mississippi or Florida or Alabama or Missouri or any other red state, right?

00:15:47.000 You want to make sure that the federal government actually makes room for differences of opinion.

00:15:52.000 And this is why it is very important.

00:15:54.000 The world of law is not the same as the world of culture or even the world of sort of political thinking.

00:15:59.000 The world of law establishes supposedly neutral principles.

00:16:02.000 Once those principles have been established, they are very difficult to disestablish.

00:16:05.000 Once you maximize power in the federal government, it is very difficult to then dissolve power in the federal government.

00:16:11.000 So if you make a rule, for example, that benefits people on the right at one time, at the level of the federal government, And then the left takes over that federal government, then those same powers are going to be available to people on the left.

00:16:22.000 And this is something that the right should have been aware of for quite a while, which is that if the right bought into the notion of bigger government in order to promulgate their agenda, the left eventually takes over all those instruments and then uses those instruments against precisely the people who wanted those instruments of power put into place in the first place, which is why the right has traditionally been a small government party in the United States.

00:16:40.000 It's why conservatives in the United States have typically wanted the government out of your business.

00:16:44.000 It's why there is this sort of right libertarian alliance.

00:16:47.000 Because the right in the United States has understood that power is a double-edged sword.

00:16:51.000 Right now, you may be wielding it, but sooner or later, somebody's gonna grab that sword from the other side and they're gonna use it against you.

00:16:56.000 I bring this up in the context of this current Texas Supreme Court case with regard to the 2020 election.

00:17:02.000 We're gonna get to that in just one second.

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00:18:26.000 Okay, so this brings us to this Texas Supreme Court case.

00:18:29.000 So Texas filed a case with the Supreme Court.

00:18:33.000 They were trying to elevate the case directly to the Supreme Court.

00:18:35.000 So the Constitution of the United States provides that the Supreme Court has direct jurisdiction over controversies between the state.

00:18:43.000 So that means that it doesn't have to go through the appellate procedure. It goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. Now there is a debate inside sort of original circles as to whether the Supreme Court has to take up that case or whether the Supreme Court can reject that case.

00:18:56.000 So really what is going up to the Supreme Court right now is a petition that the Supreme Court will allow Texas to bring this case.

00:19:03.000 17 other states have now signed on to this case as well.

00:19:06.000 And the case essentially amounts to Texas and a bunch of other red states, 16 other red states, who are filing a lawsuit alleging that a series of swing states did not properly implement election law inside their own borders.

00:19:18.000 And therefore, these 17 Republican states were disadvantaged in the electoral college.

00:19:23.000 And therefore, the federal government should step in and basically rewrite all of the election rules in these particular states.

00:19:30.000 That's the essence of the case.

00:19:31.000 And the case makes a couple of claims.

00:19:33.000 Some of them are pretty flimsy, legally speaking.

00:19:35.000 For example, they make a due process claim, suggesting that substantive due process was not taken.

00:19:40.000 Essentially, it's not fair.

00:19:42.000 It's not fair is not a legal argument.

00:19:44.000 From an originalist perspective, it's not fair is probably the worst legal argument.

00:19:47.000 Due process.

00:19:49.000 Was never meant to be quote-unquote substantive.

00:19:51.000 It's getting a little bit arcane, but substantive due process is the basic idea under the Constitution.

00:19:56.000 The basic idea is that you cannot have your life, liberty, or property removed without due process of law.

00:20:00.000 Now you would say to yourself, due process of law means that there has to be a trial.

00:20:04.000 There has to be a trial by jury.

00:20:05.000 There has to be a law in place.

00:20:06.000 It can't be an ex post facto law.

00:20:07.000 It has to be a law that was in place before you committed a crime.

00:20:10.000 That's what due process means.

00:20:12.000 The Supreme Court has crafted out of whole cloth this bizarre position that there is such a thing as substantive due process, which, if you think about that phrase for a second, it makes no sense at all, because process and substance are not the same thing.

00:20:23.000 They are opposites, in fact.

00:20:24.000 There's the substance, and then there's the process that you use when you apply it to the substance, right?

00:20:28.000 A substance of a crime would be like murder.

00:20:30.000 The process would be how you adjudicate whether somebody has committed murder or not.

00:20:34.000 Substantive due process is basically the Supreme Court deciding it's not fair.

00:20:38.000 So under the rubric of substantive due process, for example, The Supreme Court ruled that abortion was a right.

00:20:44.000 So substantive due process has long been a bugaboo in right-wing legal circles.

00:20:48.000 The Texas case relies on substantive due process.

00:20:50.000 It makes the claim that this is not fair because Texas has certain voting procedures and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania violated their own voting procedures and therefore that's not fair.

00:20:58.000 Okay, the reason that they're making that claim, of course, is because presumably they think that if the electors in those various states are not selected on the basis of the popular vote in those states, but by the state legislatures, all of which are red, then presumably they will vote for Trump and it will shift the outcome of the election.

00:21:13.000 Now, Texas, in the case, doesn't say that.

00:21:16.000 They say, no, no, no, we're just concerned about the state of the law here.

00:21:19.000 But that seems rather dicey, considering that they didn't file this lawsuit until the last five minutes, right?

00:21:24.000 If they were really that concerned about the state of play in these various states with regard to internal election law, they theoretically should have filed the lawsuit long before.

00:21:33.000 They should have filed the lawsuit when Pennsylvania first redid its mail-in balloting initiative back in 2019, when a Republican legislature voted for universal mail-in balloting in 2019 before the pandemic, by the way.

00:21:43.000 Now, there are certainly Constitutional concerns on the state constitutional level in a large variety of these states, Pennsylvania being the most obvious.

00:21:52.000 In Pennsylvania, it is true that the state constitution suggests that you require a constitutional amendment in order to radically redo its voting laws the way that they were done in 2019.

00:22:01.000 Like, that's a legit cause of action.

00:22:03.000 Should that be elevated to the Supreme Court?

00:22:05.000 Typically, the Supreme Court says, listen, the federal government has nothing to do with internal deliberations with regard to the creation of electors in a presidential election.

00:22:15.000 Now, what the Texas case is claiming is that the Constitution of the United States says that state legislatures shall determine the method of how electors are selected.

00:22:26.000 So the state legislature could delegate that to the population, the state legislature could pass laws regarding how people are to vote, but it has to come from the state legislature is the claim that Texas is making.

00:22:36.000 Now, that claim is fairly plausible on its face.

00:22:39.000 The problem is that in law, you have to show a discrete, particular injury.

00:22:43.000 Okay, you have to have what is called standing.

00:22:45.000 So, as I pointed out on the show yesterday, if producer Colton gets hit by a car, I can't sue the guy who hit Colton with the car on Colton's behalf.

00:22:52.000 Colton has to sue.

00:22:53.000 Or his family members have to sue.

00:22:55.000 His heirs have to sue, right?

00:22:56.000 I can't sue because I don't have standing.

00:22:58.000 Okay, so for Texas to claim that it has standing to challenge the internal laws of a place like Pennsylvania with regard to its voting, It sounds good on the surface if you want the election to change, but it is actually a very, very bad legal principle.

00:23:09.000 The reason it is a bad legal principle is now you have opened the door.

00:23:12.000 This is what I mean when I say you do not want to appeal to the federal government as your solution to all problems, because once the federal government has a particular power, it's going to use it against you.

00:23:22.000 If, let's say, the Supreme Court were to take up the Texas challenge and say, you know what?

00:23:25.000 Texas is right.

00:23:26.000 Texas was disadvantaged and affected because Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Georgia, their election laws were poorly drawn and didn't actually prove fraud, by the way.

00:23:36.000 Nothing in the Texas lawsuit actually alleges fraud or voter irregularity actually happened.

00:23:39.000 It doesn't actually allege that.

00:23:40.000 It just says that the procedures used here violated the state constitutions within those states.

00:23:45.000 Let's say that the Supreme Court went along with that argument.

00:23:48.000 Saying that Texas has standing to sue because Texas is part of the Electoral College and therefore they're disadvantaged if Pennsylvania screws up its own voting.

00:23:55.000 Here is the problem with that.

00:23:57.000 The problem with that is that you now end up in the position where any state could sue any other state for a law implemented in that second state As long as it had an indirect effect on the first state.

00:24:08.000 So, for example, California could sue Alabama on the basis of Alabama's abortion laws by claiming that, listen, if people in Alabama can't get abortions, you know, they're flying into California in order to do that.

00:24:18.000 And that means that Alabama's abortion laws, they affect us. 1.00

00:24:21.000 And there's a right to privacy under the Constitution of the United States under Roe versus Wade.

00:24:26.000 And therefore, California would have standing to sue.

00:24:28.000 Okay, this is not the world you want.

00:24:31.000 If you want the country to hold together, you do not want there to have to be uniform laws across the entire country on a wide variety of issues in which states can sue each other to provide for that uniformity.

00:24:40.000 Then you do basically have a bare majoritarian cram down, right, effectuated by the Supreme Court.

00:24:45.000 You actually don't want this.

00:24:46.000 Okay, so you can think that some of the claims made in the Texas lawsuit are legit, but they don't have standing.

00:24:51.000 To provide them standing would be a constitutional error of pretty extreme magnitude.

00:24:56.000 And not only that, even if they were granted standing to judge that Texas could change election law inside Wisconsin or inside Pennsylvania, that is a sword you do not want to grant the Supreme Court.

00:25:08.000 That is just not something you want the Supreme Court involved in.

00:25:11.000 Right now, there are a majority of Republican appointees on that bench.

00:25:14.000 Okay, in 10, 15 years, that probably is not going to be the case, or at least there's a shot it won't be the case.

00:25:19.000 We'll get to more of this in just one second.

00:25:22.000 First, let us talk about the fact that if you are a good family person, you want to make sure that your family is protected.

00:25:28.000 One of the ways you make sure your family is protected, obviously, is you own a firearm.

00:25:31.000 I'm a big advocate of the Second Amendment.

00:25:33.000 Your rights and your freedoms are dependent on the fact that you are able to defend yourself and defend your family and defend your community.

00:25:38.000 But here is the problem.

00:25:39.000 You see cases like this all the time in the media where a good guy has to shoot a bad guy and then the good guy ends up in jail or the good guy ends up getting picked up by the cops and grilled.

00:25:47.000 You need to know your rights.

00:25:48.000 You need to know when you can and cannot actually use your firearm.

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00:26:29.000 Okay, so that state action that Texas is taking is an attempt to move beyond what is the norm in terms of interstate relations and to actually maximize the power of the federal government to control what happens within states.

00:26:43.000 This is something Republicans should not be in favor of.

00:26:45.000 Remember, Democrats are openly proposing the rewriting of the Voting Rights Act to allow federal preclearance of gerrymandering and redistricting in Republican states.

00:26:53.000 They want to take control from the top down.

00:26:56.000 And now they wouldn't even have to do that via the legislature.

00:26:58.000 Now they could just do it through the Supreme Court.

00:27:00.000 California could say, listen, We have a certain number of Congress people, because we draw our districts properly.

00:27:05.000 But, you know, down in Georgia, they don't draw their districts properly.

00:27:08.000 And so we are suing in the Supreme Court, saying that our congressional delegation has been watered down by the Georgia congressional delegation, and therefore the Supreme Court is going to have to re-gerrymander Georgia.

00:27:20.000 Is this something you want?

00:27:21.000 Do you want the Supreme Court, at the behest of California, re-gerrymandering, redistricting Republican states?

00:27:27.000 One of the great glories of the American system is that you have delegated powers.

00:27:30.000 Actually, honestly, one of the guarantees against widespread voter fraud, and I mean like national voter fraud, is the fact you do not have a centralized voting system in the United States.

00:27:39.000 A centralized voting system makes it more likely, not less likely, that there's going to be voter fraud.

00:27:44.000 In fact, inside states, one of the best guarantees against voter fraud and voter irregularities is the fact that the system itself is decentralized down to the county and precinct level.

00:27:52.000 And so, again, I can agree with a lot of the feelings about how the election rules were done in Pennsylvania.

00:27:58.000 The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, for example, randomly suggesting that you can count ballots after the day of the election is crazy. 0.99

00:28:07.000 The original decision by a Republican legislature in Pennsylvania to go along with universal mail-in balloting is idiotic. 0.98

00:28:14.000 There are serious problems in these electoral strategies, and they do provide for the possibility of fraud. 0.97

00:28:17.000 And it is true that Democrats are pushing procedures like getting rid of voter ID in a variety of states that would make it easier to commit voter fraud.

00:28:25.000 However, to set up the generalized legal principle, which is what Supreme Court cases are about, the generalized legal principle that a state can sue another state for law applied inside that second state that doesn't really affect the first state directly is just a disaster.

00:28:38.000 It opens a can of worms in serious, serious fashion.

00:28:42.000 Well, nonetheless, about 106 Republican congresspeople have jumped into this race.

00:28:47.000 By the way, I'm noticing that folks on the left are suddenly respecting federalism again.

00:28:51.000 Again, this is one of these beautiful things that the left does.

00:28:53.000 So the left hates federalism.

00:28:55.000 As long as states' rights mean that right-wingers actually control states, this means that states' rights are really bad.

00:29:01.000 They want nationalized rule from the top.

00:29:02.000 The minute that they think they're getting something out of federalism, suddenly federalism becomes good again.

00:29:06.000 So federalism was really bad when Jan Brewer, governor of Arizona, started enforcing immigration law.

00:29:11.000 At that point, they were like, you know what?

00:29:14.000 The federal government has supremacy.

00:29:17.000 The supremacy clause suggests that Jan Brewer is not allowed to enforce immigration law on her own. 0.99

00:29:22.000 Then you have California, and California's like, you know what?

00:29:24.000 We're going to enforce environmental law on our own.

00:29:27.000 And the left's like, federalism!

00:29:28.000 Federalism's very good now.

00:29:31.000 So pay no attention to the ridiculous spinning of the left, because for the left, Institutions are merely an element of power, right?

00:29:38.000 They just grab power and they use it whenever they can.

00:29:41.000 And I understand the backlash to that on the right, which is, okay, fine.

00:29:43.000 So we'll grab the institutions and we'll use the power when we have the power.

00:29:46.000 We won't worry about the institution of neutral principles.

00:29:49.000 The problem is that it is much easier to move under the guise of already established neutral principles than it is to violate the neutral principles.

00:29:58.000 Institutional checks and balances and institutional norms still do exist.

00:30:02.000 And the more of those that are blown up, the easier it's going to be for future people to grab hold of sort of this empty area and then use it in their own favor.

00:30:10.000 So, 106 House Republicans have now signed on to this lawsuit.

00:30:16.000 According to Yahoo.com, on Tuesday, Texas's Attorney General filed a lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, alleging that the states improperly manipulated voting rules.

00:30:31.000 Seventeen red states have since filed in support of the suit, even though Texas and several other states had implemented the same mail-in and early voting rules by the same methods.

00:30:38.000 In a further paradox, 106 GOP House members also joined Texas's suit as amici curiae, despite the fact many of them had been re-elected on the same exact ballots.

00:30:45.000 In other words, they were coming from states.

00:30:47.000 They're challenging the electoral methods used in the same states where they were elected, which obviously is sort of a weird oddity.

00:30:54.000 Not every congressional Republican is on board with the Texas suit.

00:30:57.000 Senator Ben Sasse suggested that Texas' Attorney General was begging for a pardon and filed a PR stunt rather than a lawsuit.

00:31:04.000 Now, I'm not going to suggest that that's the case.

00:31:05.000 Maybe it's perfectly genuine on the part of Ken Paxton, who is the Texas AG.

00:31:08.000 I'm just saying that the principle that would be established by the case itself is not a particularly good principle.

00:31:15.000 What is irritating in the extreme is, again, many things can be true at once.

00:31:19.000 One can be that I think that this lawsuit is badly predicated.

00:31:22.000 I think that it sets a bad principle going forward, legally speaking.

00:31:25.000 I think that if you were going to prove voter fraud, you do it the way that Georgia is talking about doing it.

00:31:29.000 You do it the way that the Georgia GOP is talking about doing it.

00:31:32.000 You file actual suits that demonstrate actual voter fraud.

00:31:35.000 You bring evidence.

00:31:36.000 You bring names.

00:31:37.000 You bring voter lists.

00:31:38.000 You don't say, I don't like the procedures in that particular state.

00:31:41.000 That is not my own state.

00:31:42.000 And so, you know what?

00:31:43.000 I'm filing a lawsuit and directing it directly to the Supreme Court.

00:31:45.000 Like, that's not the way this should work.

00:31:48.000 Truly, it's not the way.

00:31:49.000 Now, that can be true. 0.78

00:31:50.000 It can also be true that there's real suspicion in states like Georgia that irregularity happened. 0.80

00:31:56.000 There's also truth to the idea that the voting rules in these states are garbage and that we shouldn't have had mass mail-in voting this year.

00:32:03.000 Somehow, Israel was able to carry out 97 elections in the last year. 0.65

00:32:06.000 I mean, really, they have an election like every 12 hours in Israel now.

00:32:10.000 They carried them all out in person, effectively, and it was fine.

00:32:14.000 And it turns out that we had mass voting at the beginning of November, and that did not cause a mass spike in COVID cases. 0.99

00:32:20.000 So the notion that we had to do universal mail-in balloting is really, really stupid and really, really silly. 0.99

00:32:25.000 All of that can be true. 1.00

00:32:26.000 It can also be true that the media's overwrought reaction to the Texas lawsuit is irritating and stupid. 0.98

00:32:32.000 And that the same people who are complaining about the threat to democracy are fine with threatening democracy when it suits their purposes. 0.97

00:32:37.000 And this is why nobody has any trust in the other side.

00:32:39.000 You want to talk about the country splitting apart?

00:32:40.000 There are two ways that the country could split apart.

00:32:42.000 One is that people just keep wrestling over the institutions of power so as to cram down their own particular view on everybody else.

00:32:50.000 The other doesn't even require that.

00:32:52.000 The other is that there is such loss of faith in the other side That everybody assumes that everybody has bad intentions, which leads to the first eventuality, right?

00:33:01.000 If you believe the other side has bad intentions and they're going to grab the government gun and point it at you, you are more likely to want to grab that gun first, right?

00:33:07.000 Then it's a, then it's a use the government gun or be killed by the government gun situation.

00:33:12.000 And this is why so many Republicans have reacted to Democrats threatening democracy over and over and over by saying, okay, well, you know what?

00:33:18.000 We don't really, you know what?

00:33:19.000 We're not going to be the ones standing in the breach here.

00:33:22.000 So it is somewhat irritating when we hear all of these folks on the left suddenly decrying the challenges to elections and the complaints about voter fraud and voter irregularity and voting procedure when literally two months ago, this is all they were talking about.

00:33:36.000 Donald Trump and Louis DeJoy, the head of the post office, the postmaster general is going to remove mailboxes.

00:33:41.000 Donald Trump is engaging in voter suppression.

00:33:43.000 We had record voting this year, by the way.

00:33:46.000 Okay, and then as soon as the election's over, it's like, oh no, it's clean.

00:33:48.000 How dare you challenge the election?

00:33:50.000 This sort of gaslighting leads to the lack of trust, which leads to the belief that people will game the system, that they will engage in voter fraud, that they will try to grab that government gun and use it against you.

00:34:00.000 And so when you have Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC saying, people are dying while they file this Texas lawsuit.

00:34:05.000 I don't remember Mika Brzezinski being quite so upset when people were literally dying as there were mass protests in the streets over the bullcrap notion that America is systemically racist.

00:34:13.000 This kind of gaslighting from the media does have a real downstream effect on how people think about the institutions of government.

00:34:18.000 And it actually leads to the centralization of government paradoxically.

00:34:21.000 Instead of people saying, I disagree with you, you disagree with me.

00:34:23.000 So maybe the federal government should be less powerful.

00:34:25.000 It turns into, I disagree with you.

00:34:27.000 I suspect that you are going to try to use the federal government to cram down your viewpoint on me.

00:34:31.000 Therefore, let me grab the power of the federal government and use that to cram down my viewpoint on you.

00:34:36.000 Okay, so here is Mika Brzezinski.

00:34:39.000 Again, this is just, I would say, deeply irritating and annoying.

00:34:45.000 These are Trump's deaths. 0.98

00:34:47.000 This is Trump's virus. 0.88

00:34:49.000 It's not Trump's presidency anymore.

00:34:52.000 And yet he continues to try and grab onto it in some pitiful or self-centered effort to create a media empire beyond his departure.

00:35:03.000 And exactly what is that departure going to look like?

00:35:06.000 Is he going to hold on to the curtains and be dragged out of there while people are dying?

00:35:12.000 I don't even know how to describe this behavior.

00:35:14.000 It wouldn't be allowed in a three-year-old child.

00:35:18.000 Ah, come on.

00:35:19.000 The overwrought.

00:35:19.000 I'm sorry.

00:35:20.000 Trump is filing lawsuits and it's just so terrible.

00:35:22.000 And how dare anybody file lawsuits? 0.98

00:35:25.000 Four years of Russian collusion crap and this is what you buy. 0.99

00:35:27.000 This is what you buy. 0.99

00:35:28.000 That doesn't mean that all of what's been going on for the last several years in terms of attacks on our institutions is good. 0.90

00:35:35.000 But to pretend that it started with Trump or that Trump is some sort of break in kind from what has been happening before is quite silly. 0.95

00:35:42.000 In fact, I think the silliest element of this was, you know, exactly this sort of historical ignorance. 0.95

00:35:46.000 Michael Beschloss, who is the NBC historian. 0.60

00:35:50.000 He tweeted out yesterday that Donald Trump keeps complaining about the press.

00:35:54.000 And he's like, Lincoln never complained about the press.

00:35:57.000 Lincoln literally shut down 300 newspapers and jailed people who disagreed with him.

00:36:00.000 So you picked a poor example, official historian over at NBC.

00:36:05.000 Institutional distrust is growing.

00:36:07.000 It's growing because we don't trust each other, and we don't trust each other mainly because one side of the political aisle decided a very long time ago that people on the other side of the political aisle were elementally evil and needed to be curbed by the power of the federal government.

00:36:20.000 And the blowback you get is going to be on the institutional level, and it is bad.

00:36:23.000 It is not good blowback.

00:36:25.000 I think that the institutions of the United States ought to be preserved.

00:36:28.000 If the right is attacking them, I think that's bad.

00:36:29.000 If the left is attacking them, I think that's bad.

00:36:32.000 But I think that is a natural outgrowth of an entire political strategy, militarized and weaponized by the left, to castigate one entire side of the political aisle.

00:36:41.000 Indeed, the side of the political aisle that traditionally has sided with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as racist, sexist, bigoted homophobes who need to be curbed by the power of the federal government.

00:36:49.000 Okay, in just a second, we're going to be getting to the Biden team, because Joe Biden, I get the feeling that Joe Biden kind of just wants to sit there.

00:36:58.000 Like, that's actually what he wants his presidency to be, is just him sitting there.

00:37:02.000 Indeed, he's selected president by the Electoral College December 14th.

00:37:05.000 I have a feeling that Joe Biden really just kind of wants to not do anything.

00:37:09.000 He's so happy to be there because he spent his entire life trying to get there that he is sort of cracking back against the more radical members of his coalition.

00:37:18.000 But I don't think he's going to be able to hold back those tidewaters. 1.00

00:37:21.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:37:22.000 First, let us talk about the fact that if you are an American citizen, you need to protect yourself.

00:37:28.000 You need to protect your rights.

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00:38:37.000 Alrighty, in just one second, we're going to get to Joe Biden supposedly attempting to hold back those tidewaters and failing, it seems. 0.98

00:38:43.000 We'll get to that in one second.

00:38:44.000 First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire member.

00:38:47.000 Today, it's Kyle Cushman of North Carolina who sent in this outstanding Triple threat Tumblr shot to our mailbag in the picture.

00:38:55.000 A smiling baby boy is sitting on the couch, clearly thrilled by his family's latest acquisitions.

00:39:01.000 The message reads, Indeed.

00:39:02.000 That is the essence of parenting excellence.

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00:39:04.000 You want to be a great parent?

00:39:04.000 for getting the all access subscription.

00:39:06.000 I thought you might enjoy this picture of my very cute and squishy baby son, Henry, surrounded by the best beverage vessels the world has to offer.

00:39:12.000 Indeed, that is the essence of parenting excellence.

00:39:16.000 Right there, you wanna be a great parent?

00:39:17.000 You need to do exactly what just happened in that picture.

00:39:20.000 Thanks for the picture.

00:39:20.000 Congrats on that adorable, squishy baby.

00:39:23.000 If you are not already a Daily Wire member, now is the time to join.

00:39:25.000 We've got some amazing stuff right around the corner.

00:39:27.000 We're adding the entire PragerU catalog to dailywire.com.

00:39:30.000 Candice Owens is joining us at the Daily Wire in Nashville.

00:39:32.000 She's got her own show. 0.99

00:39:34.000 I can't wait to bring it.

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00:39:37.000 Also, The Michael Mowles Show is now five days a week, adding more content for our members to either enjoy or ignore at their peril.

00:39:43.000 By the way, Michael Mowles today, I guess, is discussing the Texas lawsuit.

00:39:46.000 I guess he might take a slightly different point of view than I do, so give that a listen.

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00:40:02.000 You're going to want to join the fight because that is the fight.

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00:40:21.000 Meanwhile Joe Biden trying to hold back the tidewaters here and failing with regard to So I think that Joe Biden basically just wants to sit around.

00:40:29.000 That's basically his plan.

00:40:30.000 I mean, he's enjoyed it for the entire campaign.

00:40:32.000 Why not enjoy it into the future?

00:40:34.000 He's building his entire team with basically just his friends.

00:40:37.000 It's going to be that 70s show.

00:40:38.000 He's just going to sit.

00:40:39.000 In that basement, smoking that bong and passing it around with, like, Susan Rice, who he likes, with Dennis McDonough, who he likes.

00:40:45.000 He sort of picked a bunch of randos that are his friends.

00:40:48.000 And then he's like, you know, I have a bunch of open positions.

00:40:51.000 Let's just pick lots to see who exactly gets what open position. 0.60

00:40:54.000 So somehow, Susan Rice is going to end up his domestic policy advisor.

00:40:58.000 Now, recognize that she was the national security advisor under Obama.

00:41:00.000 So magically, she has more from a foreign policy non-expert to a domestic policy non-expert.

00:41:05.000 So that's excellent stuff.

00:41:06.000 Also, he is choosing Dennis McDonough What?

00:41:11.000 He's never served in uniform.

00:41:16.000 He has no experience with the military.

00:41:18.000 It doesn't matter.

00:41:19.000 Joe Biden is so senile at this point, apparently, that he's just like, he's like, I have friends and those friends, look, look, Dennis, have you ever met a man in the military?

00:41:28.000 Dennis, have you?

00:41:29.000 Come on, man.

00:41:30.000 You met a person in the military.

00:41:32.000 Yeah, you're Secretary of Veterans.

00:41:34.000 And he sort of drifts off.

00:41:36.000 According to the Washington Post, however, the choices provided a fuller picture of the type of government Biden is building, one that relies heavily on officials who have spent decades in public service and has several historic firsts among the nominations.

00:41:46.000 God, the media are just, their tongues are so far.

00:41:50.000 Okay, I mean, it's just, it's horrifying.

00:41:51.000 It's the human centipede over here.

00:41:53.000 But it's had less space for rising Democratic stars and representatives of the party's liberal wing.

00:41:58.000 This is prompting opposition, not just from Republicans, but also from some of the Democrats and liberals who kept Biden united during the general election campaign.

00:42:05.000 And here is where it's gonna break out into the open.

00:42:07.000 Prepare thyselves.

00:42:09.000 And so Time Magazine, I love this.

00:42:11.000 Time Magazine decided on its person of the year.

00:42:13.000 So who should be the person of the year?

00:42:15.000 The truth is the actual people of the year should be Big Pharma, right?

00:42:19.000 Much maligned Big Pharma that developed a vaccine for COVID inside of a year, right?

00:42:24.000 Which is unbelievable.

00:42:25.000 Like, inside of nine months, they went from zero to 100, and now hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine for a contagious, deadly disease are going to be rolled out over the course of the coming months.

00:42:34.000 They didn't win it.

00:42:35.000 No, the people who won it, of course, were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

00:42:38.000 Now, it's called the Person of the Year, you may have noticed, right?

00:42:42.000 Person of the Year.

00:42:43.000 Person, last I checked, was singular.

00:42:45.000 Now, I know that we use singular and plural Alternatively, these days, I know that you are allowed, as an individual human, to say that your pronouns are they and them, which is insane in and of itself.

00:42:57.000 But apparently, also, person of the year now means people of the year, because they didn't just feature Joe Biden on the cover of Time.

00:43:02.000 They featured Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. 0.96

00:43:04.000 Kamala Harris' only accomplishment was getting her ass so kicked during the primaries that she dropped off before California could even vote, and then being the right race and the right gender. 1.00

00:43:12.000 Those were her great accomplishments in this race. 0.99

00:43:15.000 Really, because if she were not black and she were not a woman, there's no way in hell that Joe Biden would have selected her. 0.84

00:43:20.000 How do I know? 0.94

00:43:20.000 Because he didn't select Amy Klobuchar, right? 0.94

00:43:22.000 Who's actually in a swing state.

00:43:25.000 He overtly said that he was picking somebody for her race.

00:43:27.000 It doesn't matter.

00:43:28.000 The media are so excited about the possibility of Joe Biden dying that they're like, you know what?

00:43:32.000 Just stick Camelot and everything. 0.54

00:43:33.000 They're just going to turn them into this two headed monster. 1.00

00:43:35.000 We're going to pretend like at no point was Mike Pence featured as like a person of the year with Donald Trump. 0.99

00:43:43.000 The vice president is a warm bucket of spit. 0.95

00:43:45.000 That's in the John Adams famous phrase. 0.99

00:43:48.000 It's a useless office, essentially, the vice presidency.

00:43:51.000 It's basically just president in waiting.

00:43:53.000 And the media can't wait, man.

00:43:54.000 Joe Biden ought to get a food taster.

00:43:55.000 Every time he's with the media, he ought to have that food taster tasting his food.

00:44:00.000 You can just see members of the media just sitting there in the room.

00:44:02.000 They got a blow dart in the back.

00:44:05.000 Great, Kamala's president now.

00:44:08.000 That's where this is going.

00:44:09.000 They cannot wait.

00:44:11.000 Putting Kamala Harris on the cover of Time Magazine as a person of the year.

00:44:14.000 Oh man, they are so eager to get rid of this guy.

00:44:16.000 They're so eager.

00:44:17.000 And they're even more eager.

00:44:19.000 Because Biden seems to still be, in some ways, an institutionalist.

00:44:23.000 I say in some ways, because he's not overall an institutionalist.

00:44:26.000 But he's making enemies among the progressive left in his own party.

00:44:28.000 Listen, you gotta give credit where credit is due.

00:44:30.000 When Joe Biden said, like Joe Biden said, in this sort of stealth phone call that he was doing with community activists and all this, he said in the phone call a couple of things that are actually worthy of note.

00:44:40.000 One, he took the Abigail Spanberger, moderate congresswoman from Virginia, Democrat position, that they shouldn't defund the police because defund the police is a phrase being used to beat up Democrats, which obviously is true. 1.00

00:44:50.000 He said we might lose that Georgia Senate race if we keep saying that over and over.

00:44:54.000 So Joe Biden cracking back against the hard left inside his own administration.

00:44:57.000 Here was that from that phone call.

00:45:00.000 I also don't think we should get too far ahead of ourselves on dealing with police reform in that because they've already labeled us as being defund the police.

00:45:12.000 Anything we put forward in terms of the organizational structure to change policing, which I promise you will occur.

00:45:19.000 Promise you.

00:45:21.000 Just think to yourself and give me advice whether we should do that before January 5th because that's how they beat the living hell out of us across the country saying that we're talking about defunding the police.

00:45:33.000 We're not.

00:45:34.000 We're talking about holding them accountable.

00:45:36.000 Okay, so Biden is cracking back against the left-wing of his party.

00:45:40.000 We'll see how well that goes for him.

00:45:41.000 But more importantly, he actually said, there's a bunch of stuff that I'm not going to do via executive order.

00:45:46.000 He said, I'm not going to ban assault weapons via executive order.

00:45:49.000 It's not something that I'm going to do.

00:45:51.000 Because I think that that's not constitutional now.

00:45:53.000 I will note, Barack Obama said the exact same thing about deferred action for childhood arrivals.

00:45:56.000 He said it dozens of times.

00:45:58.000 He said, I don't have unilateral power to suspend immigration law.

00:46:00.000 Then he went ahead and did it because, of course, Democrats very often are just violating the institutional precepts they already know they don't want to abide by, right?

00:46:08.000 They say that they like those institutions.

00:46:10.000 Then if they have to break them, then they break them.

00:46:12.000 OK, but.

00:46:13.000 Democrats are pushing Biden really hard on this stuff.

00:46:15.000 He is not.

00:46:16.000 I have serious doubts that Joe Biden is going to be the great bulwark here.

00:46:19.000 According to the New York Times today, Joe Biden is facing pressure from congressional Democrats to cancel student loan debt on a vast scale quickly and by executive action, a campaign that will be one of the first tests of his relationship with the liberal wing of his party.

00:46:30.000 Biden has endorsed canceling $10,000 in federal student debt per borrower through legislation and insisted that chipping away at the $1.7 trillion in loan debt held by more than 43 million borrowers is integral to his economic plan.

00:46:41.000 But Democratic leaders, backed by the party's left flank, are pressing for up to 50 grand of debt relief per borrower executed day one of his presidency.

00:46:48.000 More than 200 organizations, of course, including the disreputable American Federation of Teachers as well as the NAACP, have joined the push.

00:46:56.000 There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them, said Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

00:47:07.000 If we don't deliver quick relief, it's going to be very difficult to get them back.

00:47:11.000 So Joe Biden has said that he does not want to do this.

00:47:14.000 He wants to do this through legislation.

00:47:15.000 Now, this is why I think that secretly, if you're Joe Biden, you gotta be praying that the Democrats lose the Georgia Senate races.

00:47:21.000 Seriously, because then you get to claim that you were doing your best, but that you didn't get anything done. 1.00

00:47:26.000 The economy does really well because you can't wreck the economy with a Democratic majority in the Senate pushing a bunch of stupid crap. 0.99

00:47:31.000 And then you get to claim that you, to your progressive base, you were doing the best you could, but Mitch McConnell was standing in the way. 0.99

00:47:36.000 And also, you get all the benefits of Republican governance with none of the cost.

00:47:41.000 If you're Joe Biden, that's what you're hoping for.

00:47:42.000 I don't think that he is going to be that bulwark.

00:47:44.000 I don't think that Joe Biden is going to be the bulwark of normalcy and institutional fealty.

00:47:49.000 I think the chances that if Democrats were to gain the Senate in Georgia, they nuke the filibuster are 100%, which is why Republicans should go out and they should vote in Georgia en masse.

00:47:58.000 And by the way, the data suggests that that's what Republicans are doing.

00:48:00.000 They're not being dissuaded by Lin Wood and other grifters.

00:48:03.000 I mean, that is a grift move, okay?

00:48:04.000 As soon as you say that you should not vote for Republicans in a Georgia Senate election and let Raphael Warnock become a member of the Senate because you're angry about Georgia's election procedures, you've now joined a grift, okay?

00:48:15.000 That is a grift move.

00:48:17.000 I understand that people are angry.

00:48:19.000 I get it.

00:48:19.000 I do.

00:48:20.000 But that does not mean that you simply cede the seat to a radical Democrat Marxist.

00:48:26.000 That's a nutty idea.

00:48:29.000 But it's why Republicans need to hold the Senate. 0.99

00:48:31.000 If you're Joe Biden, honestly, your best shot at life may be a Republican Senate.

00:48:37.000 But Joe Biden is not going to be the guy who stands for institutional normalcy for long.

00:48:42.000 I have serious doubts that he is going to be exactly the sort of bulwark that he claims that he is going to be.

00:48:48.000 Now, meanwhile, the Hunter Biden story continues to move forward.

00:48:53.000 That Hunter Biden story is finally being you're allowed to cover it now.

00:48:56.000 That's exciting stuff.

00:48:57.000 Isn't that fun?

00:48:58.000 So the New York Times says investigation of Joe Biden's son is likely to hang over Biden as he takes office.

00:49:03.000 Why wouldn't it have been nice if the investigation of Joe Biden's son Had actually been covered, you know, before the election?

00:49:10.000 Wouldn't that have been a nice, good thing?

00:49:12.000 Well, now the New York Times is covering it because the election's over, gang.

00:49:15.000 As I pointed out yesterday, your media are just the PR wing for the Democratic Party.

00:49:18.000 Now it is safe to talk about the fact that Hunter Biden is corrupt as the day is long, and was trafficking in daddy's name, and everybody knew about this for years, including Joe Biden.

00:49:26.000 Now we can talk about it.

00:49:27.000 So the New York Times says the newly disclosed federal tax investigation into his son will test President-elect Joseph R. Biden's stated commitment to independent law enforcement while leaving him in a no-win situation that could prove distracting at best and politically and legally perilous at worst.

00:49:41.000 Unless President Trump's Justice Department clears Hunter Biden of wrongdoing before leaving office, the new president will confront the prospect of his own newly installed administration deciding how or whether to proceed with an inquiry that could expose his son to criminal prosecution.

00:49:53.000 Already, some Republicans are demanding a special counsel be appointed to insulate the case from political influence, which would be the gift that keeps on giving.

00:50:00.000 I have a feeling that that will happen before the end of the Trump administration, if indeed it comes to an end on January 20th.

00:50:06.000 I have a feeling that a special counsel will be appointed so that Joe Biden can't simply come in and quash the case against his son.

00:50:12.000 And by the way, anybody who suspects that Joe Biden wouldn't do that, that he is just, he's so institutionally loyal, that he'd be like, yeah, just go ahead with your prosecution there of Hunter.

00:50:20.000 I'm sure that's exactly what would happen with Joe Biden.

00:50:23.000 On a campaign trail, meanwhile, Biden excoriated Trump's efforts to use the FBI and DOJ to go after his enemies.

00:50:28.000 But the reality is, of course, that the FBI and the DOJ acted independently of Trump, so much so that the DOJ did not announce the investigation until now.

00:50:40.000 The DOJ had suggested it was a covert investigation, which is kind of crazy considering that there was already news of this investigation floating around in October.

00:50:49.000 There are rumors that this investigation was floating around in October, and the FBI and DOJ just refused to confirm it because they didn't want to get involved in the election, which is crazy because that's called getting involved in the election.

00:50:58.000 But in any case, the FBI and DOJ are indeed investigating Hunter Biden, and now we are allowed to cover it.

00:51:05.000 Meanwhile, Team Biden is running from this.

00:51:07.000 So Joe Biden was asked specifically about Hunter Biden, and the reporter who asked was immediately shooed out of the room the other day.

00:51:15.000 Are you talking to him?

00:51:19.000 Thank you.

00:51:20.000 Thanks.

00:51:22.000 Thanks.

00:51:22.000 Let's go.

00:51:23.000 Catch you later.

00:51:24.000 See you later.

00:51:25.000 Now, remember, it was Donald Trump who's a threat to the freedom of the press.

00:51:29.000 But ask a question of Joe Biden and you will immediately be ushered outside of the room if you are a reporter.

00:51:34.000 Also, quick flashback here.

00:51:35.000 Remember how the media covered this thing in the first place?

00:51:37.000 Remember when Christiane Amanpour suggested there was literally no evidence of Hunter Biden's corruption on CNN?

00:51:41.000 Very trusted journalist over at CNN.

00:51:43.000 This was solid stuff.

00:51:45.000 You're okay with our interest being sold out to profit?

00:51:48.000 Joe Biden and his family?

00:51:50.000 When we're suffering during a pandemic from Communist China, he's doing shady business deals with Communist China? 0.57

00:51:56.000 You're comfortable, okay?

00:51:58.000 As you know perfectly well, I'm a journalist and a reporter and I follow the facts.

00:52:03.000 And there has never been any issues in terms of corruption.

00:52:06.000 Now let me ask you this.

00:52:07.000 Yesterday, the FBI... Wait, wait, wait!

00:52:10.000 How do you know that?

00:52:12.000 I'm talking about reporting and any evidence.

00:52:17.000 Reporting and any evidence?

00:52:18.000 Oh yeah, it turns out that he's been under federal investigation since 2018, which is why it is so rich.

00:52:23.000 I just have to point out, our esteemed journalistic colleagues over at CNN, it is so rich and wonderful that Kate Baldwin of CNN, one of their anchors, she put on a sweater on Air Thursday.

00:52:37.000 It said on it, in pink writing, facts first, Because now we are just in the position of posturing.

00:52:43.000 Journalists are in the position of posturing as though this is what they do.

00:52:46.000 If you have to say that as a journalist you're facts first, that means that everybody suspects that you're not.

00:52:50.000 It also happens to be particularly rich, not just that you wore this obnoxious sweater, which is a sweater designed to say, I am better than you.

00:52:57.000 It's really a sweater designed to alienate everybody.

00:52:59.000 But also that this was immediately put online for sale by Lingua Franca for $380.

00:53:08.000 So, if you too wish to mirror the journalistic priorities of CNN, then you can buy a $380 sweater in the middle of an economic downturn and a pandemic, so that you can look like Kate Baldwin on CNN, talking about facts first on a network that routinely ignores facts.

00:53:26.000 Solid stuff right there.

00:53:27.000 And then they put up, did Lingua Franca, a little poem. 0.99

00:53:31.000 It's almost like a haiku of stupidity over at Lingua Franca. 0.92

00:53:33.000 said smoke with true red embroidery 100% cashmere hand-stitched in New York City facts are facts they aren't colored by emotion or bias they're indisputable there is no alternative to a fact facts explain things what they are How they happen. 0.97

00:53:48.000 Facts are not interpretations.

00:53:50.000 Once facts are established, opinions can be formed.

00:53:52.000 And while opinions matter, they don't change facts.

00:53:54.000 We stand with our friends at CNN who start with the facts first.

00:53:59.000 Also, you're gonna need to allow 2-3 weeks for the embroidery plus shipping time 1-3 days.

00:54:03.000 $380 so that you too can look like a reporter on a garbage news network that promulgates opinion as fact and then pretends that they are facts first.

00:54:11.000 My goodness, CNN. 0.99

00:54:12.000 What a mockery they are. 0.98

00:54:14.000 And what a mockery they continue to be.

00:54:16.000 Okay, now, I would be remiss if I did not mention that there is some good news in the country.

00:54:27.000 The NIH director announced that Americans may start receiving vaccinations on Monday for COVID-19.

00:54:32.000 The FDA is supposed to approve this thing over the weekend.

00:54:35.000 The tranching is supposed to start with people in nursing homes, as it should. 1.00

00:54:38.000 It's also going to start with frontline healthcare workers, as it should, because you don't want healthcare workers in hospitals getting infected and then infecting other people in the hospital who do not have coronavirus.

00:54:48.000 This should be tranched out according to health condition, right?

00:54:50.000 It should start with people, not even by age, but by pre-existing health condition, and then tranched out over the course of the next few months.

00:54:56.000 This is all happening under the Trump administration.

00:54:58.000 Joe Biden deserves zero credit for this.

00:55:00.000 Zero, zero, zero.

00:55:01.000 And watch, the media will try to provide him with credit, As though he has come up with a plan here?

00:55:04.000 At no point has Biden or anybody else in the Democratic Party come up with a plan here.

00:55:08.000 This is a Trump administration masterstroke Operation Warp Speed.

00:55:12.000 Trump deserves every single bit of credit here.

00:55:14.000 Democrats deserve essentially none.

00:55:17.000 I mean, this is the president's largest initiative.

00:55:21.000 It is the most powerful scientific initiative undertaken by the United States.

00:55:26.000 In all likelihood in history.

00:55:27.000 The only thing that could possibly mirror it is attempting to land a man on the moon.

00:55:31.000 But it is amazing stuff.

00:55:32.000 Here is the National Institutes of Health director announcing that Americans may start their vaccinations on Monday.

00:55:37.000 When you say very soon and very soon, do you mean, you know, today's Thursday?

00:55:41.000 Do you mean we might see shots injected on Monday?

00:55:44.000 Is that reasonable?

00:55:46.000 It's entirely possible.

00:55:48.000 I don't want to preempt the FDA.

00:55:50.000 They're going to need to look at the comments that were made today by this advisory committee, but I think it's quite reasonable.

00:55:55.000 Okay, meanwhile, how are the media covering this?

00:55:57.000 Well, MSNBC was having on an analyst to suggest that the GOP is using COVID to kill people.

00:56:02.000 This guy.

00:56:03.000 Here he was.

00:56:05.000 The real blame here is Mitch McConnell, is the Republicans, is the president, is a party that does not want to help people, that is working on one side to actually make sure the pandemic kills as many people as possible.

00:56:18.000 That seems to be the logical consequence of their policy.

00:56:21.000 And then to make sure that all the people who managed to survive it, despite their policy, suffer economically and beyond. 0.89

00:56:28.000 Solid analysis there from Anand Giridharadas, who is a commentator for MSNBC, that their goal is to kill as many people as possible.

00:56:36.000 Really, really good stuff, which is presumably why the Trump administration has developed the fastest vaccine in the history of humanity, and hundreds of millions of doses will be put out there within the next couple of months.

00:56:45.000 By the way, speaking of news that the media Largely downplayed.

00:56:49.000 Yet another peace deal was signed in the Middle East yesterday.

00:56:51.000 Full normalization of relations between Israel and Morocco.

00:56:54.000 This makes the fourth country to sign normalization of relations with Israel over the course of the last six months alone.

00:57:00.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, Israel and Morocco agreed to normalize relations, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said Thursday, marking another advance in U.S.

00:57:08.000 efforts to strengthen ties between once hostile nations in the region.

00:57:10.000 This is the Wall Street Journal reporting.

00:57:12.000 The U.S.-brokered deal was the fourth in four months between Israel and Arab countries that have refused to recognize the nation since it was created in 1948.

00:57:18.000 Netanyahu said this will be a very warm peace, adding that Israel and Morocco would quickly set up liaison offices and introduce direct flights between the two countries.

00:57:28.000 A Moroccan official didn't comment on any agreements to recognize Israel while welcoming Trump's declaration of Rabat sovereignty over Western Sahara, which is a departure from decades-long U.S.

00:57:36.000 policy.

00:57:36.000 Basically, Western Sahara is a giant desert.

00:57:39.000 There are about 600,000 people who live in the entirety of the Western Sahara.

00:57:42.000 It's been under dispute for decades.

00:57:44.000 Morocco has had effective control of it.

00:57:45.000 The United States sort of recognizes Morocco's sovereignty over that area.

00:57:50.000 And meanwhile, Morocco signs a peace deal with Israel.

00:57:53.000 OK, the entire Biden foreign policy makes no sense.

00:57:57.000 It continues to make no sense.

00:57:58.000 If there were any justice in the world, Trump would win the Nobel Peace Prize.

00:58:01.000 He's made four separate deals in the Middle East, in an area where no one could make a deal other than America surrendering to Iran over the course of the last 20.

00:58:08.000 That's an amazing accomplishment.

00:58:10.000 Naturally, the media make Kamala Harris the person of the year, along with Joe Biden, for being a human on the cover of Time magazine.

00:58:17.000 Alrighty, so just to finish this week, I thought that I'd bring back a little bit of Bible talk because, you know, I think that there's some important things to be learned from the world's most important document.

00:58:27.000 It is, by numbers, the world's most important document.

00:58:29.000 Also, fun statistic, the number one most stolen book on planet Earth is the Bible, which sort of defeats the purpose.

00:58:35.000 In any case, The portion of the Bible that the Jews read this week is the portion discussing the Joseph story, the beginning of the Joseph story.

00:58:43.000 Anyway, you'll remember that Joseph is the son of Jacob.

00:58:46.000 Jacob has 12 sons and Joseph is tossed in a pit by his brothers.

00:58:49.000 This is the subject of the musical Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat.

00:58:52.000 Right, that's the, so Joseph gets tossed in a pit, he's eventually sold to a band of traveling Midianites, he ends up in Egypt, where he ends up in jail, eventually, and then ends up becoming essentially second in command to Pharaoh, after which he reunites with his brothers.

00:59:07.000 That's sort of the short form of that particular story.

00:59:09.000 But there's another story embedded in the Joseph story that's kind of important.

00:59:11.000 The reason it's important is because it discusses one of the other brothers.

00:59:16.000 So to understand why this brother is important, you have to understand that in subsequent Jewish history, the kingdom of Israel gets divided.

00:59:23.000 If you read the Tanakh in Hebrew, the writings and the prophets in English, What you see is in subsequent Jewish history after King David, there's King Solomon.

00:59:33.000 Then after King Solomon, the kingdom starts getting divided, right?

00:59:37.000 King Solomon has a son, there's a rebellion against his son, and eventually the kingdom of Israel splits up into the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Judah, right?

00:59:44.000 This is why Jews are called Jews, right? 1.00

00:59:46.000 It's after Judah.

00:59:48.000 They're not called Israelites, they're called Jews.

00:59:50.000 So who is Judah?

00:59:52.000 Who is Yehudah in the Bible?

00:59:54.000 In Hebrew, Jews are called Yehudim.

00:59:57.000 So Judah is obviously a pretty seminal character.

01:00:01.000 So who is he in the Bible and what makes him special?

01:00:03.000 What distinguishes him from his brothers?

01:00:05.000 After all, he was the fourth son of Leah.

01:00:07.000 He's not the firstborn.

01:00:08.000 He's not the oldest.

01:00:09.000 He's not even the firstborn among the children of his mother because Jacob has four wives to produce children. 0.60

01:00:15.000 He has two handmaidens and then he also has two wives.

01:00:17.000 In any case, Judah does not look like the guy who is going to be the leader, right? 0.70

01:00:21.000 Maybe Joseph will be the leader.

01:00:22.000 He's the most clever.

01:00:23.000 Maybe Reuben will be the leader because he's the firstborn.

01:00:26.000 Instead, it ends up being Judah.

01:00:27.000 And to understand why that is, we have to understand one specific quality of leadership that Judah has, and that makes it possible for the tribe of Judah to sort of be the leading tribe.

01:00:35.000 Because the idea in Jewish thought, and also in Christian thought, is that the leadership of Israel will come from the tribe of Judah.

01:00:40.000 Okay, so the story of Judah begins basically when Judah decides that he is going to prevent Joseph from dying by selling him into slavery.

01:00:51.000 So what happens is that Joseph has all of these dreams.

01:00:53.000 And the dreams seem to suggest that he is going to predominate over his brothers.

01:00:56.000 And his brothers are like, this is a threat to us.

01:00:58.000 Our father prefers Joseph over us.

01:01:00.000 We're afraid that Joseph is going to take revenge on us. 1.00

01:01:02.000 And so let's kill him. 0.99

01:01:05.000 And so there are two ideas that are put forth. 0.99

01:01:06.000 One is put forth by Reuben, who is the firstborn.

01:01:09.000 And Reuben's idea is we are going to, Reuben, his idea is that we are going to Throw him in a pit.

01:01:14.000 I'm going to come back later.

01:01:15.000 I'm going to get him out.

01:01:17.000 We're not going to kill him.

01:01:18.000 He doesn't say this to his brothers.

01:01:20.000 He has this idea that he's going to save his brother Joseph from anything bad happening to him. 0.99

01:01:23.000 So instead of just killing him outright, we'll throw him in a pit. 0.95

01:01:25.000 That way we're not directly responsible for his death. 1.00

01:01:27.000 If he dies in the pit, he dies in the pit.

01:01:28.000 What can we have done?

01:01:30.000 And then I'll come back later and I'll get him out of the pit.

01:01:33.000 Judah instead says, OK, what we're going to do is we are going to throw him in the pit.

01:01:38.000 But then he says, what is the gain if we slay our brother and cover up his blood? 0.86

01:01:43.000 Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, but our hand shall not be upon him, for he is our brother, our flesh. 0.98

01:01:49.000 So the idea is that we're not going to kill him at all. 0.97

01:01:53.000 We'll sell him into slavery. 0.97

01:01:55.000 Okay, and Ruben comes back.

01:01:56.000 Joseph's been sold.

01:01:58.000 And Ruben starts mourning.

01:02:00.000 And he says, the boy is gone, and where will I go?

01:02:02.000 Right?

01:02:03.000 What's going to happen to me?

01:02:03.000 I'm responsible.

01:02:06.000 And so they all decide that because they're afraid that Reuben is gonna bear the consequences of Joseph being sold into slavery, that they are going to cover this thing up.

01:02:13.000 And they take the dream coat, the Technicolor dream coat, and they put blood on it, and then they go back to Jacob and they say, our brother got killed, and Jacob goes into mourning.

01:02:23.000 So that is the first instance that we see of Judah, is that Judah is trying to deflect direct blame from his brothers by suggesting that they sell Joseph into slavery.

01:02:34.000 Okay, the second thing, that we see about Judah is this really weird story about his daughter-in-law.

01:02:40.000 So Judah, like a little bit later, like right after this in the Bible, it says, at about that time that Judah was demoted by his brothers, that he was now looked upon and scorned by his brothers.

01:02:49.000 Like his brothers were angry at him for having done all of this.

01:02:52.000 So he turned away and he came to an Adulamite man named Hira.

01:02:55.000 And Judah saw the daughter of a merchant named Shuah.

01:02:57.000 He took her and he had a couple of kids.

01:02:59.000 And then one of his kids marries a woman named Tamar.

01:03:04.000 Okay, and that kid dies.

01:03:06.000 Tamar marries the brother.

01:03:07.000 This is common ancient practice.

01:03:09.000 Tamar marries the brother.

01:03:10.000 That second brother dies.

01:03:12.000 At this point, there's another brother.

01:03:14.000 And Judah says, you know what?

01:03:17.000 I don't want him to marry the youngest brother.

01:03:20.000 Right? 0.99

01:03:21.000 Because she obviously is kind of a black widow here. 1.00

01:03:23.000 And whatever happened to the first two brothers will likely happen to the third brother. 0.85

01:03:26.000 I don't want all my kids dead.

01:03:27.000 Tamar realizes that he has what is called the loverite obligation.

01:03:31.000 And so, actually, Judah, somebody from the family has to marry her, so it ought to be Judah. 0.89

01:03:35.000 So, in this really bizarre situation, she dresses up as a prostitute on the side of the road, and she has sex with Judah, who doesn't recognize her, and she conceives by him. 0.77

01:03:46.000 And then, later, he hears that she's pregnant.

01:03:49.000 And people come to him and he's like, okay, well, ancient times, death penalty for this sort of thing.

01:03:53.000 And they bring Tamar to him.

01:03:55.000 And she, instead of saying, you know, this is your kid, she instead presents his signet ring to him, which he had given her as payment.

01:04:01.000 And he, instead of going ahead with the ruse, he says, she's right.

01:04:05.000 The child is for me because I did not give her to my son.

01:04:08.000 And then she ends up having kids.

01:04:09.000 So what is the point of this sidetrack of the story?

01:04:11.000 Right?

01:04:12.000 It literally has nothing to do with the rest of the story.

01:04:13.000 Like, we don't know what it has to do with Joseph.

01:04:15.000 It breaks up the narrative.

01:04:16.000 What exactly is going on here?

01:04:17.000 The answer is that Judah, after creating a whole narrative about Joseph, just so he did not have to take responsibility, and Reuben didn't have to take responsibility, and no one would have to take responsibility, Judah changes.

01:04:28.000 Something happens to Judah.

01:04:29.000 And suddenly, he starts taking responsibility for things that are happening.

01:04:33.000 Right, suddenly he's presented like an amazing opportunity to completely abdicate responsibility.

01:04:39.000 Got a woman here. 1.00

01:04:39.000 She's three months pregnant. 1.00

01:04:40.000 He impregnated her.

01:04:41.000 She does not actually name him as the father.

01:04:44.000 And he could just say, okay, take her out and be done with her.

01:04:47.000 And instead he says, nope, that's my kid.

01:04:50.000 I've sinned here.

01:04:50.000 It's my fault.

01:04:51.000 And the kid is legitimate, obviously.

01:04:54.000 And this ends up being the seat of the Davidic line.

01:04:57.000 The Davidic line doesn't end up getting started in a very honorable fashion.

01:05:00.000 It gets started by the daughter-in-law of a man who's supposed to marry her, acting like a prostitute, literally, on the side of a road, in order to get pregnant by him. 0.83

01:05:08.000 That is not the way that you would... If you were going to write the history of your nation, this is typically not the way you start writing the history of the most prestigious dynasty in your nation, is with this.

01:05:18.000 And Judaism is filled with this sort of stuff, which is one of the reasons I love it.

01:05:21.000 It's because Judaism and Old Testament religion is filled with these very shaded and contradictory and inhuman stories of people. 1.00

01:05:30.000 It is not about whitewashing the past.

01:05:31.000 It's about acknowledging the sins of the past and recognizing that out of those sins very often comes something good.

01:05:36.000 But the thing about Judah that is unique here is, again, the fact that he accepts responsibility for the bad things that he has done.

01:05:42.000 And this becomes the common pattern with Judah, to the point that, when later in the story, he faces Joseph, right?

01:05:47.000 He comes down to Egypt.

01:05:48.000 Now Joseph is the second in command to Pharaoh.

01:05:51.000 And Judah comes down, and Joseph is attempting to see if his brothers have learned anything from what they did to him a long time ago.

01:05:58.000 And he says, I want you to bring your youngest brother, Benjamin, who is Joseph's full brother, right?

01:06:02.000 All these others are his half-brothers.

01:06:04.000 And he says, I want you to bring Benjamin here, I want to imprison Benjamin.

01:06:07.000 And Judah instead says, take me instead.

01:06:10.000 He says the same thing to Jacob.

01:06:12.000 To get Jacob to let them send Benjamin, he says, you know what?

01:06:14.000 I'll put my life on the line.

01:06:16.000 Reuben says, I'll take my sons, and you can take my sons instead.

01:06:19.000 He says that to Jacob.

01:06:20.000 Something happens to Benjamin, then you can do something to my sons.

01:06:23.000 But Judah's like, you know what? 0.95

01:06:24.000 No.

01:06:24.000 You can do something to me.

01:06:25.000 He says, I will take the full responsibility.

01:06:27.000 He says, send the lad with me.

01:06:29.000 We will get up and go.

01:06:29.000 We will live and not die, both you and also our young children.

01:06:32.000 I will guarantee him.

01:06:33.000 From my hand, you can demand him.

01:06:35.000 If I do not bring him to you and stand him up before you, I will have sinned against you forever.

01:06:39.000 And this becomes the common theme for Judah.

01:06:41.000 Judah is always the guy who takes responsibility. 0.86

01:06:43.000 So...

01:06:44.000 What do we learn about this from leadership?

01:06:45.000 The one quality we know above all about Judah is that Judah takes the hit. 0.77

01:06:50.000 Judah takes the blame. 0.61

01:06:51.000 Judah is willing to accept the responsibility. 0.78

01:06:54.000 Because accepting the credit is easy.

01:06:56.000 That's the easy part.

01:06:57.000 Accepting the responsibility is the tough part.

01:06:59.000 And that's something to remember when we select our leaders.

01:07:01.000 So here's the bottom line.

01:07:02.000 When you live in a democracy and you select your leaders, it's up to you to determine what qualities you're looking for, one of the top qualities you should be looking for.

01:07:08.000 As Harry Truman once said, is the buck stops here.

01:07:11.000 If your leaders are not willing to say that the buck stops with them, and if it appears they are trying to always escape responsibility by blaming somebody else, or blaming the American public, or blaming something else, well then, that person probably should not be the leader.

01:07:23.000 Alrighty.

01:07:23.000 Now, if you want to hear a different take on the Texas lawsuit than the one you heard on this show, head on over to Michael Knowles' show right now.

01:07:29.000 He's talking about it.

01:07:30.000 And then later today, Andrew Klavan will be guest hosting two additional hours of my show, The Ben Shapiro Show.

01:07:34.000 So make sure to tune in for that.

01:07:36.000 Have a wonderful Hanukkah if you celebrate it.

01:07:38.000 Otherwise, we'll see you here next week.

01:07:40.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

01:07:40.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

01:07:43.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.

01:07:45.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Colton Haas.

01:07:49.000 Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:07:51.000 Our Supervising Producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.

01:07:54.000 Production Manager, Paweł Lajdowski.

01:07:56.000 Our Associate Producers are Rebecca Doyle and Savannah Dominguez.

01:07:59.000 The show is edited by Adam Szajewicz.

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01:08:11.000 You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.

01:08:14.000 I think there are enough of those already out there.

01:08:16.000 We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.

01:08:21.000 So my main focuses are life, family, faith.

01:08:26.000 Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 11, 2020

Is Secession Upon Us? | Ep. 1155

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