The Ben Shapiro Show - SHOCKER: Woke Kindergarten Fails

00:00:00.000 One of the beauties of life is the simple fact that no matter how stupid things get, reality always wins. 0.90

00:00:06.000 And in fact, whether we're talking about your personal life or whether we're talking about politics writ broadly, the simple fact of the matter is eventually you are going to run up against reality and reality is going to win.

00:00:18.000 So when it comes to bad political ideas, that doesn't mean they can't emerge victorious in the short or even the midterm.

00:00:23.000 It does mean that the realities of human nature, the realities of the world surrounding you, Those don't just go away, and eventually those policies will fail dramatically.

00:00:32.000 The dumber the policies, the faster they tend to fail.

00:00:35.000 It doesn't mean people acknowledge the failure, but it does mean that they fail pretty quickly. 1.00

00:00:38.000 One of those dumb ideas that has obviously taken center stage of late has been the dumb idea of woke. 1.00

00:00:45.000 Woke is a foolish idea. 0.99

00:00:46.000 Now, what exactly is wokeness? 0.94

00:00:48.000 We've defined it before on the show.

00:00:49.000 Wokeness is the basic idea that if there is any sort of disparity between group outcome in American life, that somehow that group disparity is due to discrimination.

00:00:58.000 And the only corrective is therefore reverse discrimination, some form of discrimination that is going to equalize the outcomes of the various groups.

00:01:05.000 And we have seen a wide variety of policies that have been implemented in order to close all of these gaps.

00:01:11.000 The quest for cosmic justice, as Thomas Sowell, the great thinker of our time, has put it, 0.58

00:01:16.000 is a foolish quest.

00:01:17.000 It is not something that can be solved because the reality is the vast majority of group gaps 0.87

00:01:22.000 are either inborn or they are the result of culture and environment.

00:01:26.000 Because those are all the factors that there are.

00:01:27.000 That does not mean that every result is the result of inborn differences.

00:01:31.000 For example, differences in outcome intellectually very often are about educational differences

00:01:37.000 or cultural differences as opposed to say IQ.

00:01:40.000 But, for example, height differentials between particular groups, those are about genetics.

00:01:44.000 This sort of stuff happens throughout life.

00:01:46.000 And looking at the rationales for why things are different in terms of outcomes between groups is a good way of crafting good policy. 1.00

00:01:52.000 But we've basically thrown all of that out in favor of stupidity. 1.00

00:01:55.000 And now we're going to educate our children in this stupidity. 1.00

00:01:58.000 But the problem is, again, that stupidity does not reflect reality. 1.00

00:02:02.000 And we are seeing the results of that. 0.99

00:02:04.000 So, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, a Hayward elementary school struggling to boost low test scores and dismal student attendance is spending $250,000 in federal money for an organization called Woke Kindergarten to train teachers to confront white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression, and remove those barriers to learning.

00:02:21.000 The Woke Kindergarten Sessions train teachers on concepts and curricula that are available to use in classrooms with any of Glassbrook Elementary's 474 students.

00:02:29.000 Those sessions are funded through a federal program meant to help the country's lowest performing schools boost student achievement.

00:02:34.000 And again, the basic theory behind this program is that if you just teach kids self-esteem, they will magically become smarter and better performing.

00:02:41.000 If you teach them about the radical injustices of the life they lead in the freest country in the history of the world, then magically, they will perform better.

00:02:49.000 Only one problem.

00:02:50.000 It fails.

00:02:51.000 Because reality always wins.

00:02:53.000 According, again, to the San Francisco Chronicle, two years into the three-year contract with Woke Kindergarten, a for-profit company, a student achievement at Glassbrook has now fallen, prompting some teachers to question whether the money was well-spent, given the needs of students who are predominantly low-income.

00:03:07.000 Two-thirds of the students are English learners.

00:03:08.000 More than 80% are Hispanic Latino.

00:03:11.000 English and math scores hit new lows last spring.

00:03:14.000 Less than 4% of students were proficient in math.

00:03:17.000 Just under 12% were proficient at grade level in English.

00:03:20.000 That is a decline of about 4 percentage points in each category.

00:03:24.000 Efforts to reach the organization Woke Kindergarten were not successful. 0.99

00:03:28.000 Now, again, that is not a particular shock because, again, woke kindergarten is a stupid idea. 0.99

00:03:34.000 Teaching kids terrible ideas is likely to make them perform worse, not better. 0.99

00:03:38.000 District officials defended the program saying woke kindergarten did what it was hired to do.

00:03:42.000 That's true.

00:03:42.000 They made the scores lower.

00:03:44.000 It made things worse.

00:03:44.000 They did exactly what they were hired to do, which is to exacerbate the inequities Therefore, to claim that the system itself is broken.

00:03:52.000 One of the most amazing things about the nonprofit world, and this is true virtually across the board, is that nonprofits are constantly exacerbating the problems they are supposed to fight so they can raise money to fight those problems.

00:04:01.000 This happens all the time in nonprofit land.

00:04:04.000 And when you talk about companies like Woke Kindergarten, if all of a sudden achievement rose, Based on, you know, actual metrics of performance, the need for kindergarten would disappear.

00:04:14.000 So one of their actual jobs, one of the jobs of, for example, politically motivated people on the left, is to exacerbate inequalities so as to claim inequity.

00:04:24.000 That is the goal.

00:04:25.000 Because if at any point those inequalities actually narrowed as a result of freedom and good incentive structures, then what would they do for a living?

00:04:33.000 The district pointed to improvements in attendance and suspension rates.

00:04:37.000 They said the school is no longer on the state watch list, only to learn from The Chronicle the school was not only still on the list, but also had dropped to a lower level.

00:04:44.000 The district official is like, we're doing even better.

00:04:46.000 And the crown is like, no, you're not.

00:04:47.000 We have a list right here.

00:04:48.000 The decision to bring in Woke Kindergarten rather than a more traditional literacy or math improvement program aligns with the belief by some parents and educators that the current education system isn't working for many disadvantaged children.

00:05:00.000 The solution, say these advocates, is for educators to confront legacies of racism and bias in schools and to talk about historic white supremacy so students feel safe and supported.

00:05:11.000 There's only one problem, which again, is that this is a giant fail.

00:05:15.000 So what exactly is in the woke kindergarten curriculum that is failing so dramatically?

00:05:20.000 Well, the curriculum includes wonderings, which pose questions for students.

00:05:23.000 Questions like, if the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?

00:05:29.000 That's what you need to ask your first grader. 1.00

00:05:32.000 I mean, implicit with all of its ridiculous, stupid, immoral assumptions. 0.97

00:05:38.000 In addition, the woke word of the day includes strike, ceasefire, and protest, offering students, quote, language of the resistance to introduce children to liberatory vocabulary in a way they can easily digest, understand, and most importantly, use in their critiques of the system. 0.99

00:05:51.000 Now, you have to understand that woke kindergarten is just the stupidest boiling down of what is, in fact, an extraordinary amount of educational theory.

00:06:00.000 There is a theorist of education who is very often quoted In these terms, and Paulo Freire, Paulo Freire was talked about by James Lindsay, who we've had on the Sunday special before. 0.87

00:06:12.000 He was a Brazilian educator who talked about what he called the pedagogy of the oppressed.

00:06:16.000 And the basic idea was that you were supposed to inculcate in students, not knowledge or wisdom, or even ways of solving problems.

00:06:24.000 You were supposed to impose in students a revolutionary ideology.

00:06:29.000 That was the entire goal.

00:06:31.000 And some of his students, like Jane Thompson, said, quote, there is no such thing as a neutral education process.

00:06:36.000 Education either functions as an instrument, which is used to facilitate the integration

00:06:39.000 of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it,

00:06:43.000 or it becomes a practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality

00:06:48.000 and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

00:06:51.000 And this is the way that so much of our educational system has been taken over,

00:06:55.000 is that it really isn't when we say they're achieving their goal.

00:06:57.000 Their goal is not to increase the math scores.

00:06:59.000 The goal is not to increase the English scores.

00:07:01.000 The goal of these educators is to exacerbate, again, inequities.

00:07:05.000 It is to present America as a terrible place that must be overthrown.

00:07:09.000 That is the generalized goal of the system.

00:07:11.000 So they're actually doing exactly what they were designed to do.

00:07:14.000 But the reality is they lead to more failure.

00:07:17.000 We'll get to more on this in one second.

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00:08:16.000 And again, these are just politically motivated far-left activists who are trying to indoctrinate small kids in the belief that America is a terrible, terrible place with your taxpayer dollars.

00:08:24.000 In fact, here is the woke kindergarten founder, a person named Akia Gross, awarded again a $250,000 grant by the federal government, apparently.

00:08:33.000 And here is this human.

00:08:36.000 Yes, everyone, the rumors are true.

00:08:38.000 I am anti-Israel. 0.98

00:08:41.000 I am pro-Palestine.

00:08:43.000 And I am 100% 10 toes down anti-Israel. 0.81

00:08:49.000 I believe Israel has no right to exist. 1.00

00:08:50.000 This person would be tossed off a building in Gaza.

00:08:52.000 I believe the United States has no right to exist.

00:08:54.000 I believe every settler colony who has committed genocide against native peoples against indigenous people has no right to exist.

00:09:05.000 I believe in a free Palestine.

00:09:07.000 From the river to the sea.

00:09:10.000 I believe one day Palestine will be free!

00:09:13.000 Is this news to anybody? 1.00

00:09:14.000 By free just means kill all the Jews. 1.00

00:09:17.000 By the way, this person would immediately be thrown off a building in the Gaza Strip. 0.99

00:09:20.000 Also, by the way, if she does not believe in America as a country and believes that

00:09:24.000 anyone who is not originally on this continent needs to be thrown off the continent, what 0.99

00:09:28.000 the hell is she doing here? 0.97

00:09:30.000 That's a weird thing.

00:09:31.000 But again, the pedagogy of the oppressed is the way that kids are being taught in public

00:09:37.000 Now, it runs up against reality, which is that this is a deeply unsuccessful way of thinking.

00:09:41.000 It is a way that facilitates unsuccess, facilitates the suffering of children and their families, makes their lives materially worse.

00:09:48.000 It is destined to fail.

00:09:50.000 And eventually, parents might realize this, and they might think, hey, you know what would be great is if my kid actually knew how to do math.

00:09:55.000 You know what would be awesome?

00:09:56.000 Is if my kids actually knew how to read. 1.00

00:09:58.000 That might be a more useful thing than being inculcated to be part of the woke revolution by morons like this. 1.00

00:10:04.000 Reality always wins, and reality is going to win here as well. 1.00

00:10:08.000 Maybe these folks win in the short term, but in the long term, they lead down a dark road of despair and depression and failure.

00:10:15.000 And the people who are inculcated in the system will be failures, because they're trained to be failures.

00:10:21.000 Meanwhile, reality setting in an enormous number of American institutions.

00:10:25.000 Another one of the institutions where reality is now setting in is Dartmouth.

00:10:29.000 So Dartmouth actually got rid of the SAT during COVID.

00:10:33.000 And now they've decided to put it back in.

00:10:35.000 Why are they using the SAT again? 0.98

00:10:36.000 Because, originally, again, these equity fools have been suggesting that because there are disparate outcomes with regard to the SAT, that, for example, black students on average do less well on the SATs than, say, white students. 0.97

00:10:49.000 And white students do less well on the SATs, by the way, than Asian students. 0.97

00:10:52.000 But they don't mention that part.

00:10:53.000 Whenever they say that there are group disparities in SAT outcomes, they claim the test itself is racist.

00:10:58.000 Which is sort of like saying that just because Jews are, on average, a lot shorter than, say, natives of certain parts of Africa, that must mean that rulers are biased.

00:11:09.000 Rulers are a problem.

00:11:10.000 Clearly, we need different yardsticks or something.

00:11:13.000 The SATs are just a test.

00:11:15.000 That's all they are.

00:11:16.000 And as it turns out, they are highly predictive of student performance.

00:11:20.000 So Dartmouth got rid of it for a while, and it turned out that that was a giant fail.

00:11:23.000 They were letting in a bunch of people who were not qualified to actually go through Dartmouth.

00:11:25.000 So now they're bringing back the SAT and the ACT.

00:11:28.000 The New Hampshire School, according to the Wall Street Journal, said it was making the move based on new research showing that at Ivy League and other highly selected schools, standardized test scores help predict first-year college performance even better than high school grades do, which of course makes perfect sense.

00:11:41.000 Because there are a lot of high schools where you're grading on a curve.

00:11:43.000 If you go into a crappy high school, it may turn out that an A student at a crappy high school is equivalent to a C student at a really, really good high school.

00:11:50.000 But the SAT is the same test that everyone is taking.

00:11:54.000 Lee Coffin, the Vice President and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid said, quote, I've become less convinced that test-optional is working for us at Dartmouth, reanimating the policy based on evidence.

00:12:03.000 He said there were many occasions since the school adopted its test-optional policy in 2020.

00:12:07.000 Again, they adopted it in 2020, not as a result of COVID, but as a result of the, quote unquote, social justice protests surrounding the death of George Floyd.

00:12:15.000 Because a lifelong criminal and drug addict died and this rejiggered all of American life up to and including whether you need to take an SAT in order to get into Dartmouth.

00:12:26.000 He said that there were many occasions since the school adopted its test optional policy when he wished he had one more data point on a student to quote, confirm what we think is a high achieving profile.

00:12:34.000 In other words, it turns out that good predictors remain good predictors.

00:12:38.000 He said test scores will be especially useful as Dartmouth receives more applications from high schools that are unknown to the admissions office and schools where grade inflation is a concern.

00:12:47.000 In fact, the simple fact of the matter is, an excellent way for people who are in bad neighborhoods to get ahead is testing.

00:12:55.000 Testing is a pathway out.

00:12:56.000 If you're a really smart kid, and you were stuck in a crappy public school, in a bad system, and you didn't perform in that crappy public school and bad system because you were surrounded by bad influences, but you score high on the SAT, that's a great way of overcoming that particular burden, actually.

00:13:10.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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00:14:20.000 So test optional is going to go away at a lot of these schools because again, the lies of equity are lies and they're being shown to be lies.

00:14:26.000 Reality always wins.

00:14:27.000 Reality is also winning with regard to America's streets.

00:14:32.000 So the simple fact of the matter is that eventually we are going to have to make a choice in this country between whether we actually want police officers to be able to do their job or whether we don't want police officers, period.

00:14:42.000 There is no third option where police officers are magical dispensers of justice who never make mistakes and everything looks pretty on camera.

00:14:48.000 That is not the job of cops.

00:14:50.000 And yet, in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, we decided that basically, cops were the problem.

00:14:55.000 And whenever we saw, as civilians, something we didn't like on tape, we were the best adjudicatory body for the behavior of police officers.

00:15:04.000 Now, the reality is, the day-to-day life of a police officer is incredibly difficult.

00:15:07.000 You wouldn't want to do that job, which is why you're not doing that job.

00:15:10.000 All the people on the left who watch a police officer tackle somebody say, oh my gosh, that looks so rough.

00:15:13.000 Oh my gosh, that looks so terrible.

00:15:15.000 Are you the one policing for drugs?

00:15:17.000 Like, what is it that you do?

00:15:19.000 And the reason I ask that is not because cops don't do things wrong.

00:15:22.000 There are certain times where cops absolutely do things wrong.

00:15:24.000 And when they violate the rules, then obviously there should be punishments for that.

00:15:29.000 But instead, what you have typically is people who don't like the fact that the police have to do rough things to rough people in order to maintain the peace.

00:15:37.000 And so they yell at the cops every time they see a tape of something that doesn't look like what they would do.

00:15:41.000 Because a normal civilian's de-escalation technique is to walk away from a conflict.

00:15:46.000 That's normally what de-escalation looks like for those of us who are not members of the police, for example.

00:15:51.000 Well, what that's resulting in is people simply walking away from the job of policing.

00:15:56.000 The harder we've made it for our police officers, the fewer police officers there are.

00:16:00.000 The fewer police officers there are, the more you have cities like Washington, D.C.

00:16:02.000 that have been completely taken over by crime.

00:16:06.000 And the generalized attitude toward cops, which moved from defund the police, which is way too out there, way too loud, even Democrats ran away from that slogan screaming by late 2020 because of the increase in crime rates, to demoralize the police.

00:16:21.000 Demoralize the police remains the way that we now do policing in the United States.

00:16:24.000 This is a point being made by Heather McDonald over at City Journal.

00:16:27.000 She says on January 30th, the New York City Council passed the How Many Stops Act over the veto of Mayor Eric Adams.

00:16:32.000 The law requires New York police officers to fill out a form nearly every time they interact with a civilian.

00:16:37.000 If, for example, an officer asks a potential bystander to a shooting, if he had witnessed that shooting, the officer will have to complete a form listing the bystanders' race, sex, and age.

00:16:47.000 Are there other potential witnesses in the area who urgently need to be contacted before they disperse?

00:16:51.000 Too bad, identity-based paperwork comes first.

00:16:54.000 But that act is innocuous compared with California's data collection requirements for police officers.

00:16:58.000 New reporting obligations under the Racial and Identity Profiling Act now require California officers to fill out an eight-page form with nearly 200 fields when they make what is known as a custodial stop, meaning the civilian is not free to walk away.

00:17:13.000 The form, generated by the California DOJ, comes straight from the Race and Gender Studies classroom.

00:17:17.000 The officer first documents whether he, the officer, is a cisgender man, cisgender woman, transgender man, transgender woman, or non-binary person.

00:17:25.000 To avoid placing a retrogressive gender straightjacket on the state's public servants, the form also allows an officer to check both non-binary person and cisgender woman, for example.

00:17:35.000 The officer must list a sexual identity.

00:17:38.000 There's also an extensive officer race or ethnicity section.

00:17:41.000 Then, the officer has to document the civilian's perceived sexual orientation, LGB+, or straight heterosexual, and the civilian's perceived gender, cisgender, transgender, or non-binary.

00:17:53.000 The discerning officer is allowed to surmise that the person they've stopped is more than one.

00:17:58.000 California created this form, as Heather McDonald points out, to gin up anti-police narratives.

00:18:02.000 Once an officer's identity profile is merged with that of the person stopped, the possibilities of finding some form of identity oppression are virtually endless.

00:18:08.000 While the predictable result of all of this is why the hell would you join up as a cop?

00:18:11.000 I've talked to cops all over this country.

00:18:13.000 Very few of them.

00:18:14.000 Have high morale right now.

00:18:16.000 Every police officer that I know in LAPD, I know a bunch of them, is looking to get out as fast as humanly possible, and they are scared to death of being on the streets. 0.91

00:18:23.000 Not because they're scared of the bad guys, but because they're afraid that if they deal with the bad guys, and there's a bystander with a camera, and they're a bunch of morons watching NBC, that the officer will spend the rest of his life in jail. 0.94

00:18:34.000 And so they've stopped policing. 0.96

00:18:35.000 They don't want to be on the streets.

00:18:36.000 The thing they signed up for is the thing they have been prohibited from doing by the woke.

00:18:41.000 Which is why, as of August of last year, the number of officers employed by the LAPD dropped below 9,000.

00:18:47.000 That was a staffing level unseen since the 1990s.

00:18:52.000 The total number of officers is way too low.

00:18:54.000 People are retiring as fast as humanly possible.

00:18:56.000 People are taking like half pensions in order to get the hell out.

00:18:59.000 The same thing is happening with the NYPD.

00:19:01.000 In July 2023, the New York Post reported the number of people interested in taking the NYPD exam is cratering, likely hitting a new low as the city struggles to fill positions left vacant by senior officers leaving in droves.

00:19:13.000 The NYPD last July expected 3,000 test takers for the winter exam and 1,300 people signed up.

00:19:20.000 So people are not even signing, because why would you sign up for this?

00:19:23.000 Again, this is reality.

00:19:24.000 When you tell people they cannot do their jobs and they will be punished for doing their jobs.

00:19:27.000 And that basically they are now going to be gender and diversity workers who don't have the ability to stop crime. 0.73

00:19:31.000 Who would potentially sign up for any of that?

00:19:34.000 And it's in every major city.

00:19:35.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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00:20:39.000 How desperate are police departments for recruits?

00:20:43.000 They're so desperate that I received, via a friend, this Instagram post.

00:20:47.000 This is from Detroit Police.

00:20:50.000 Telling recruits.

00:20:51.000 They're so desperate for recruits at this point that they are literally telling people that they should sign up to join the cops, even if they have outstanding warrants for misdemeanors.

00:20:59.000 If they have an ongoing warrant, like they haven't paid traffic tickets and they've been absconding from paying the traffic tickets, you can still apply.

00:21:04.000 Not only that, if you are fat and out of shape and you have no shot at possibly being an effective cop, they still want you.

00:21:11.000 Because, hey, we can make you skinny. 0.99

00:21:13.000 That's how desperate they are for cops.

00:21:15.000 Here are some of the tape.

00:21:16.000 I'm Sgt.

00:21:17.000 Wilson with the Detroit Police Recruiting Unit.

00:21:19.000 Today we have this awesome program going on ran by our field recruiters.

00:21:23.000 They saw a need as they went out and talked to people and they realized there were things that people were afraid to ask questions about and made them afraid to apply.

00:21:31.000 Let's say you have warranted traffic tickets.

00:21:33.000 Maybe you don't think you're physically able to complete the physical agility test.

00:21:37.000 We have some resources available to you.

00:21:39.000 We are partnering with 36th District, Secretary of State, Sir Metro, and our very own DPD FIT program.

00:21:47.000 We're gonna clear up your warrants so you can be a cop.

00:22:01.000 That's how desperate they are because there just aren't enough people who are willing to join the police force in Detroit and they can't find people to recruit.

00:22:08.000 Same thing happening with Chicago.

00:22:11.000 In 2023, there's a report out on Chicago PD and their troubles recruiting.

00:22:15.000 Here it was.

00:22:17.000 The Chicago Police Department attended a job fair on the city's southwest side today, hoping to combat a mass exodus of city police officers.

00:22:24.000 The Chicago Police Department has a little over 1,600 fewer officers than it had in 2019, with 200 of them planning to retire in 2024.

00:22:35.000 Sergeant of Community Policing in the 8th District, Matthew Malloy, attended the job fair at West Lawn Park and says the turnover is concerning, but there's many opportunities within the department.

00:22:45.000 We do appreciate the veteran officers that have, you know, skills and experience.

00:22:52.000 But this is a good opportunity for us to restack the ranks and, you know, the next generation of police can come through.

00:22:57.000 Okay, I mean, you're not going to be able to recruit anybody.

00:23:00.000 Let's just be clear about this.

00:23:01.000 Especially when you're political officers, people like Brandon Johnson, the mayor, when hit with questions about, say, the border or crime, his excuse is, I don't have to do my job.

00:23:09.000 I'm a black man with three kids.

00:23:11.000 He literally was asked yesterday about border problems and the vast wave of migration from illegal immigrants into the city.

00:23:17.000 And his answer was, stop bothering me.

00:23:18.000 I'm a black guy with three kids.

00:23:19.000 I'm not kidding.

00:23:20.000 This is what he said.

00:23:21.000 I have children who attend schools who have soccer games, y'all.

00:23:25.000 You know, you all are asking me as if I'm not a parent in this city.

00:23:29.000 I get it.

00:23:29.000 I'm mayor.

00:23:30.000 I get it.

00:23:31.000 But you're asking me to give you a date and I have to court.

00:23:34.000 Do you understand that you have not had a mayor like me?

00:23:36.000 I get that.

00:23:37.000 I have a wife.

00:23:38.000 I have children.

00:23:39.000 They have schedules.

00:23:41.000 And plus, we still have public safety that we have to address.

00:23:44.000 We still have the unhoused that we have to address.

00:23:46.000 I still have a budget that I have to address. 0.60

00:23:47.000 And I'm doing all of that with a black wife raising three black children on the west side of the city of Chicago. 0.91

00:23:52.000 I am going to the border as soon as possible. 0.99

00:23:58.000 So the excuse for being a garbage mayor of Chicago is you haven't had a mayor like me. 0.96

00:24:03.000 Well, I mean, they did. 0.99

00:24:04.000 Lori Lightfoot was a black lesbian who was the mayor. 0.95

00:24:06.000 So actually, you're less historic than Lori Lightfoot.

00:24:08.000 And I'm pretty sure that there have been mayors of Chicago who have kids before.

00:24:12.000 But again, this is the excuse making for bad governance.

00:24:17.000 This is what the predictable result of all this is lawless cities.

00:24:20.000 The predictable result of all of this bad governance, bad equity standards leads to lawless cities.

00:24:25.000 In Washington DC, how much trouble are they having getting recruits?

00:24:29.000 They've now lowered the physical standards for police officers.

00:24:32.000 In fact, back in 2023, Reporters for one of the local outlets tried to take the physical test to become a D.C.

00:24:41.000 police officer.

00:24:41.000 These are just people who, like, no training, nothing.

00:24:44.000 These are just people who, like, work for the local news network.

00:24:46.000 And they passed with flying colors because it turns out that basically you just have to be able to stand upright.

00:24:50.000 Here's what it sounded like.

00:24:52.000 Lieutenant Patrick Loftus with MPD says although the need is large, we want quality officers, not just a quantity.

00:25:00.000 He says those who apply to be officers need a baseline level of fitness.

00:25:04.000 MPD invited 7 News to take the test.

00:25:06.000 You start by running from a police car, then going through cones, running up and down steps, dragging 165 pounds of dead weight, Then crawling on your hands and knees.

00:25:18.000 And then one of the hardest parts, the fence.

00:25:21.000 And as I learned, don't relax too early, because you may not stick the landing.

00:25:25.000 You also identify a mob suspect based on the color shirt.

00:25:31.000 And you have to do it all in one minute, 28 seconds.

00:25:34.000 There's also an untimed part where you rack and pull the trigger on an unloaded weapon.

00:25:42.000 I know it can look a little intimidating with the fence behind me and some of these other steps, but it's totally doable.

00:25:47.000 Loftus says most people pass and they give two chances on prospect day and you can come back again.

00:25:53.000 Most people pass and you get two chances on prospect day.

00:25:57.000 This is where you end up. 1.00

00:25:59.000 It is incredibly difficult to recruit police officers when you are addicted to woke idiocy. 0.99

00:26:03.000 It is incredibly difficult to police crime when you've told the police that they can't actually police crime. 0.97

00:26:07.000 It's incredibly difficult to do education when your chief goal of education is inculcating revolution rather than teaching people how to read and write.

00:26:15.000 Reality always wins.

00:26:16.000 So what are you gonna end up with? 0.99

00:26:17.000 Stupider students, more money spent, worse police forces, fewer recruits, and more crime. 1.00

00:26:22.000 That's what you're gonna end up with. 1.00

00:26:23.000 And the predictable result of that is political failure.

00:26:26.000 And that's what you are seeing in terms of Democrats on a national level.

00:26:30.000 Now in these cities, many of these cities have basically been cleansed of anything remotely resembling Republican governors.

00:26:34.000 There's just not two parties in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C., New York.

00:26:39.000 These are all one-party cities at this point.

00:26:42.000 And so those cities are gonna meet with even more reality because if they can't get out of the mindset that has stuck them in this cycle of failure, they will continue to fail.

00:26:51.000 There is no other choice.

00:26:52.000 But on a national level, other choices can be made.

00:26:55.000 And you can see that people increasingly in this country are deeply unhappy with the choices that have been made by their political class.

00:27:02.000 That is true certainly for Joe Biden.

00:27:04.000 It is true for Kamala Harris.

00:27:05.000 There's a reason why Joe Biden is pulling lower than any incumbent in modern history right now.

00:27:10.000 I mean, part of that is because he's no longer sentient.

00:27:12.000 And again, the just sense that no one has control of this ship, that the navigational tools are spinning wildly over here.

00:27:23.000 That is not a wrong impression.

00:27:24.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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00:28:38.000 Here was Joe Biden yesterday, suggesting that just a few years ago, he met with a person who died 20 years ago.

00:28:43.000 He gets the country wrong.

00:28:44.000 He gets the person wrong.

00:28:45.000 He gets the year wrong.

00:28:46.000 Here we go.

00:28:46.000 Joe Biden, your president of the United States.

00:28:49.000 Right, right, right after I was elected, I went to what they call a G7 meeting and all the NATO leaders.

00:28:56.000 I was in I was in the south of England and I sat down and I said, America's back.

00:29:03.000 I made Iran from Germany. 0.63

00:29:05.000 I mean, from France looked at me.

00:29:07.000 And said, you know, how long are you back for?

00:29:18.000 And I looked at him, and the Chancellor of Germany said, what would you say, Mr. President, if you picked up the paper tomorrow in the London Times?

00:29:30.000 And the London Times said, A thousand people break through the House of Commons, break down the doors.

00:29:37.000 Two bobbies are killed in order to stop the election of the Prime Minister.

00:29:42.000 What would you say?

00:29:42.000 I never thought about it from that perspective.

00:29:45.000 What would we say if that happened in another democracy around the world?

00:29:50.000 God, he is so out of it.

00:29:52.000 Okay, so he's mentioning Francois Mitterrand.

00:29:53.000 First, he calls him the leader of Germany.

00:29:55.000 He was French.

00:29:56.000 Second of all, Francois Mitterrand died in 1997.

00:29:59.000 So that's not a person he talked to four years ago unless he is talking with ghosts again.

00:30:05.000 Reality always wins.

00:30:06.000 The reality is this is an 81-year-old senile man.

00:30:08.000 That is the reality.

00:30:09.000 Joe Biden is no longer with us.

00:30:11.000 He has not been with us for quite some time.

00:30:13.000 And meanwhile, his backup, another harsh reality for Democrats, is even less popular than Joe Biden is.

00:30:19.000 So there's that latest NBC poll, and it showed that Joe Biden's favorability rating is 18 points underwater, 36% favorable, 54% unfavorable.

00:30:27.000 There's only one politician in America who is less popular than Joe Biden, and it's his vice president, the person who will take over for him if he dies during his second term, Kamala Harris, who is at 28% favorable and 53% unfavorable.

00:30:39.000 and 53% and 53% unfavorable. 0.98

00:30:44.000 Those are truly garbage numbers. 0.99

00:30:48.000 Here she was yesterday trying to rip on Donald Trump. 1.00

00:30:49.000 This is not going to hunt, folks.

00:30:52.000 For years, the former president has stoked the fires of hate and bigotry and racism and xenophobia for his own power and political gain.

00:31:08.000 He accused immigrants of, quote, poisoning the blood of our country.

00:31:15.000 And after Neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, he said there were, quote, very fine people on both sides.

00:31:27.000 The former president openly talks about his admiration for dictators and has vowed that he will be a dictator on day one.

00:31:40.000 As opposed to Joe Biden, who literally said yesterday that the Supreme Court may have blocked him from alleviating student loan aid, but did not stop him.

00:31:52.000 But don't worry, the dictator is on the other side again.

00:31:55.000 Reality is, these people are unpopular.

00:31:56.000 They're unpopular because their governance is bad.

00:31:58.000 And reality is starting to set in on pretty much all sides.

00:32:01.000 When it comes to illegal immigration, for example.

00:32:03.000 Just a few years ago, it was considered totally insane to suggest invasion was happening at our southern border.

00:32:09.000 Now, of course, the position of the Democratic Party has shifted because the American people totally understand that there is an invasion at the southern border.

00:32:15.000 When I say invasion, I don't mean that the people who are crossing the southern border as illegal immigrants are all seeking to do Americans harm, because that isn't true.

00:32:21.000 Many of them are coming here in order to either work or be on welfare or whatever it is. 0.99

00:32:25.000 That's not the same thing as, say, an invading army.

00:32:28.000 But Mexican drug cartels are in control of America's southern border.

00:32:32.000 They are facilitating A vast migration wave that constitutes an invasion. 0.78

00:32:37.000 Again, I've sat on the border.

00:32:38.000 I have watched Mexican drug cartel drones in American territory.

00:32:41.000 I'm not sure what you would call that other than an invasion.

00:32:45.000 Even Al Sharpton is now calling it an invasion.

00:32:47.000 That's how badly things are going for the Democrats.

00:32:49.000 Here's Al Sharpton on MSNBC last night using language direct from Donald Trump.

00:32:53.000 You're seeing an influx of migrants all over the country that frankly have people outraged. 1.00

00:32:59.000 And couldn't there be some kind of public pressure put in the next couple of days in some of these senator states saying, why are you allowing this to continue?

00:33:11.000 Because at the end of the day, senators have to deal with their voters and at the same time, In the bill, you give money to Gaza, to civilians in Gaza and Israel.

00:33:23.000 But the border, I mean, we're looking every day at the invasion of migrants and they're playing a time game with politics on this?

00:33:32.000 What's amazing here is Sharpton admits that there's effectively an invasion at the southern border.

00:33:37.000 And you can almost see the Senator Chris Murphy wincing when he says that.

00:33:40.000 But he's blaming Republicans for that.

00:33:42.000 And that's not going to hunt either, because the reality is Joe Biden could stop this today.

00:33:46.000 He could literally stop this today.

00:33:48.000 We'll get to the latest on the border bill in just one second.

00:33:51.000 First, folks, this is a no-brainer.

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00:34:43.000 Meanwhile, Democrats are struggling with regard to this immigration issue.

00:34:46.000 They've tried to split Republicans over a border bill.

00:34:48.000 The border bill has a bunch of flaws.

00:34:50.000 We went through it in detail yesterday.

00:34:53.000 Andy McCarthy also goes through it in detail over at National Review.

00:34:57.000 And as he points out, there are some things about the bill that are better than current law.

00:35:01.000 So standards for asylum, for example, have changed.

00:35:04.000 They've been a bit strengthened in some areas, including the fact that you now are supposed to show that you don't have the ability to stay at home in your own country and just move areas or live in a country that you pass through in order to come to the United States.

00:35:16.000 But again, All of this law depends upon implementation, and that, in the end, is the real problem.

00:35:21.000 Joe Biden has demonstrated zero capacity to actually implement the law as written.

00:35:26.000 He has plenty of law on the books that would allow him to enforce the law right now.

00:35:32.000 And Anne McCarthy says Congress should pressure Biden to use his existing authority to secure the border and end the crisis.

00:35:37.000 The most notable thing about the current senatorial proposal is that it would undermine the existing presumptions in the law that illegal aliens should be apprehended, detained, and rapidly removed, and that the United States is not required to provide asylum.

00:35:47.000 In other words, the baseline assumption of the bill is that a certain number of people will get asylum, that a certain number of people will be imported into the center of the country, and all the rest.

00:35:55.000 The House GOP also issued a statement ripping into the border bill.

00:35:58.000 This thing is basically DOA.

00:36:00.000 Even Mitch McConnell in the Senate, who originally backed the bill, is now saying he's not going to bring it up for a vote if he has anything to say about it because he doesn't have the votes on the Republican side of the Senate in order to effectuate its passage.

00:36:10.000 But the House majority in the House, they say, quote, House Republicans oppose the Senate immigration bill because it fails in every policy area needed to secure our border and would actually incentivize more illegal immigration.

00:36:20.000 Among its many flaws, the bill expands work authorizations for illegal aliens while failing to include critical asylum reforms.

00:36:26.000 Even worse, its language allows illegals to be released from physical custody, and that would effectively endorse the Biden catch and release policy.

00:36:32.000 The so-called shutdown authority in the bill is anything but, riddled with loopholes that grant far too much discretionary authority to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

00:36:39.000 The bill also fails to adequately stop the president's abuse of parole authority and provides for taxpayer funds to fly in house illegal immigrants in hotels through the FEMA Shelter and Services Program.

00:36:49.000 In other words, why doesn't Joe Biden just do his job?

00:36:52.000 That is essentially what the House GOP is saying.

00:36:54.000 And the protestations by Democrats that Joe Biden needs more authority, those are falling on deaf ears because they aren't true.

00:37:00.000 Here's Chris Murphy trying to do that routine, the senator from Connecticut.

00:37:04.000 Do you think that President Biden should just try to take this issue away from the Republicans, who seem to be playing politics with it, and use every bit of his executive authority to address the border crisis on his own?

00:37:16.000 Say, basically, won't pass the legislation?

00:37:18.000 Okay, I'm gonna do it myself.

00:37:20.000 Would that be a good strategy for him?

00:37:23.000 Well, here's the problem, David.

00:37:25.000 The president can't do this by himself.

00:37:27.000 The president doesn't have the legal authority without additional legislation to control the border and fix the broken asylum system in the way that needs to be done.

00:37:38.000 And this is part of the fiction that gets perpetuated on the American public by Republicans.

00:37:43.000 Now, they wanted to pass border legislation last year.

00:37:46.000 In fact, It was so important to them in the House of Representatives that they named it H.R.

00:37:50.000 2.

00:37:50.000 It was the second bill they introduced.

00:37:52.000 But as soon as it became clear that bipartisan border reform legislation might pass, Republicans in the House started screaming, no, the president doesn't need any new laws.

00:38:00.000 He has all the authority he needs.

00:38:03.000 That's just not true.

00:38:05.000 Okay, it is true.

00:38:07.000 On the laws, not only does he have the authority, he is required, for example, to have ICE deport people who are in the country illegally, and he's not doing any of that.

00:38:15.000 He's not interested in doing any of that.

00:38:17.000 The American public knows this, and the reality is going to be very harsh for Joe Biden on that issue.

00:38:22.000 Speaking of which, eventually reality is going to set in with regard to the economy as well.

00:38:25.000 So right now, we've sort of been floating above the economic repercussions for having spent more money than God has ever seen.

00:38:33.000 Jerome Powell, the Fed Chair, he says that they have to be careful about rate cuts at this point, considering that the economy continues to truly chug.

00:38:43.000 We have good employment right now, very, very good employment numbers.

00:38:46.000 Wages are finally starting to rise, as opposed to inflation.

00:38:50.000 And so one of the things he's worried about is injecting more money into the system.

00:38:53.000 But one of the things he's pointing out is that the future obstacle to growth is not going to be How do you assess the national debt?

00:38:59.000 rates right now. The biggest obstacle to growth is going to be the fact that government is going to

00:39:03.000 eat up more and more of the private sector earnings in the United States, and that's going to have to

00:39:06.000 be made up somewhere. Here was Fed Chair Powell saying the United States is on an unsustainable

00:39:10.000 fiscal path. So for all the happy talk that we've been hearing about the economy, the reality is the

00:39:15.000 long-term fiscal future of the United States eventually will hit reality as well. How do you

00:39:19.000 assess the national debt? We mostly try very hard not to comment on fiscal policy and, you know,

00:39:27.000 know instruct Congress on how to do their job when actually they have

00:39:30.000 oversight over us.

00:39:31.000 But is the national debt a danger to the economy, in your view?

00:39:35.000 In the long run, the U.S.

00:39:37.000 is on an unsustainable fiscal path.

00:39:39.000 The U.S.

00:39:39.000 federal government's on an unsustainable fiscal path.

00:39:42.000 And that just means that the debt is growing faster than the economy.

00:39:46.000 Well, that is not curable.

00:39:48.000 If you think that you can outgrow the debt, not at the rates that we are racking up debt.

00:39:52.000 But meanwhile, Joe Biden continues to dare reality to clock him.

00:39:56.000 So yesterday, for example, he was bragging about his attempts to go around a Supreme Court order telling him he cannot unilaterally relieve student loan debt.

00:40:04.000 And he says, the Supreme Court blocked me, but didn't stop me.

00:40:06.000 The Supreme Court announced it has blocked me, but they didn't stop me.

00:40:13.000 Again, we used to call that dictatorial type language.

00:40:16.000 They blocked me, but they didn't stop me.

00:40:18.000 They literally told you not to do the thing and then you went and you did the thing.

00:40:21.000 That's an amazing statement by Joe Biden.

00:40:23.000 He's unilaterally raising the debt at this point.

00:40:26.000 Eventually there will be consequences because eventually there are always consequences.

00:40:29.000 The same holds true in the Middle East as well.

00:40:32.000 Joe Biden has sent an extraordinary level of mixed signals.

00:40:34.000 On the one hand, he will unleash American strikes on 80 separate targets simultaneously hit.

00:40:39.000 On the other hand, he will then tell Israel that Israel has to stop With regard to what it's doing with Hezbollah in the north, that Israel has to be kinder to Hamas, that what we really need to pursue as the United States is that we really need to pursue a two-state solution that incentivizes Islamic terrorism. 0.87

00:40:53.000 Those mixed signals are being taken as weakness by all of the parties that hate the United States.

00:40:59.000 Right now, if Joe Biden actively wanted to stop potential conflict from broadening in the Middle East, what he needs to do is say that America is a wall.

00:41:06.000 That America is not going to allow this to broaden into a larger conflict in the Middle East.

00:41:10.000 That if Hezbollah does not, for example, move north of a river that they are bound by international law to move north of, That if that zone in the south of Lebanon is not demilitarized, the United States is going to fund Israel to the extent that Israel will be able to basically destroy Hezbollah where it stands. 0.57

00:41:25.000 That's what the United States should be doing if they want to prevent further war.

00:41:28.000 Right now, the biggest problem the United States has is it is not a credible actor in the Middle East.

00:41:32.000 There's no credible threat from the United States.

00:41:35.000 Calling up America's enemies and warning them about potential strikes is not exactly set to create a deep quaking and trembling in the Iranian regime.

00:41:45.000 Now the White House is realizing that they're trying to walk it back.

00:41:48.000 So there were reports before a set of strikes about a week ago that the U.S.

00:41:52.000 had warned the Iraqi government, which is effectively run by Iran, that American strikes were forthcoming.

00:41:57.000 Now, according to Politico, the U.S.

00:41:58.000 is saying that it did not directly notify the Iraqi government American forces would strike inside the country on Friday, contrary to an earlier White House statement.

00:42:05.000 U.S.

00:42:05.000 forces conducted airstrikes against Iranian militants in Iraq and Syria on Friday as retaliation for the killing of three U.S.

00:42:11.000 soldiers in Jordan by Iranian proxy groups.

00:42:13.000 On Monday, State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel told reporters that there was not pre-notification and that the U.S.

00:42:19.000 informed the Iraqis immediately after the strikes.

00:42:21.000 The Iraqi government, quote, understood there would be a response after the deaths of our soldiers, but that contradicted what the National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby said in a call on Friday, where he said, quote, we did inform the Iraqi government prior to the strikes occurring.

00:42:33.000 Kirby then walked it back.

00:42:35.000 He said, well, I responded with information I'd been provided at the time.

00:42:38.000 So who do you believe?

00:42:39.000 The Biden administration or the Biden administration?

00:42:41.000 I'll tell you what I believe.

00:42:42.000 I believe that the Biden administration is basically warning the Iranians to get their people out of harm's way, which is leading the Iranians to think, OK, we can push Joe Biden pretty much as far as we want to push.

00:42:52.000 And in fact, the strikes against American targets have not ceased at any point.

00:42:56.000 Here's the Pentagon press secretary, Major General Patrick Ryder, confirming yesterday that there have been continued drone attacks on American targets.

00:43:03.000 In terms of attacks in Iraq and Syria since we took these strikes on Friday, I'm actually only tracking two incidents.

00:43:11.000 There was one attack on Saturday, February the 3rd.

00:43:16.000 That was two rockets that were fired at MSS Euphrates in Syria with no injuries or damage reported.

00:43:24.000 And then I'm aware of one yesterday, February 4th.

00:43:27.000 This was a one-way attack drone that landed several kilometers from MSS Green Village.

00:43:34.000 Also, in Syria, again, no reported U.S.

00:43:36.000 injuries or damage to those facilities.

00:43:38.000 Hey, so again, it turns out the reality exists in the Middle East and 0.97

00:43:43.000 weakness will be met with aggression from the Iranians. 1.00

00:43:46.000 This is not a shock.

00:43:48.000 And every time Joe Biden and his team say two state solution.

00:43:52.000 The devil smiles because the reality is that a two state solution is not a

00:43:57.000 real possibility, given the situation on the ground in the Middle East right now.

00:44:01.000 The Palestinian Authority is a terror-fomenting group.

00:44:05.000 Gaza Strip is run by Hamas, which is a terror group that just committed the worst atrocity against Jews since World War II. 0.94

00:44:09.000 The Palestinian Authority does not even have control over the West Bank.

00:44:13.000 They can't take control over the Gaza Strip. 0.57

00:44:15.000 They're not trustworthy partners, even if they could.

00:44:17.000 No other state will facilitate the rebuilding of Gaza.

00:44:20.000 And meanwhile, the Biden administration, all they are doing by playing this game is signaling weakness to the broader Middle East.

00:44:27.000 It's absolutely foolhardy.

00:44:29.000 Reality is going to set in the Middle East too, because again, the attempts to pick away at American might in the Middle East, to pick away at freedom of trade in the Red Sea, those will continue. 0.56

00:44:41.000 Those are not going to stop so long as Joe Biden continues to show the American neck.

00:44:45.000 Now, meanwhile, Secretary of State Tony Blinken arrived in the Middle East on Monday in the hopes of preventing escalating tit-for-tat attacks with Iran-backed militias from spiraling into a broader regional war.

00:44:55.000 Now, again, you know what's the way to do that?

00:44:57.000 When tit-for-tat should be tit-for-hellfire missile.

00:45:01.000 They hit America with a drone and we blow away Qasem Soleimani.

00:45:05.000 That should be the way that America deals with threats because Iran does not want war more than the United States. 0.65

00:45:10.000 Again, this is how deterrence works.

00:45:11.000 This is a baseline foreign policy 101 in the Middle East.

00:45:16.000 Do not show your neck to your enemies.

00:45:19.000 If you do, it will be bad.

00:45:21.000 Trying to wrap all of this into a ball and then claim that if Israel makes concessions to the Palestinians, magically everything is going to fix itself is absurd.

00:45:29.000 Hamas literally rejected another ceasefire yesterday.

00:45:32.000 Hamas is currently holding over a hundred hostages still and they're using those hostages as bait to get Israel to leave Hamas in place to the delight of Iran. 0.91

00:45:42.000 In his conversation with Mohammed bin Salman, Blinken stressed the importance of addressing the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

00:45:48.000 More than 27,000 Palestinians have been killed there since October 7th, according to the Gazan Health Ministry.

00:45:53.000 Nearly 2 million people have been displaced by the fighting.

00:45:55.000 But the reality is, do you think the Saudis care deeply about what's going on in the Gaza Strip?

00:45:59.000 The only thing the Saudis care about, actually, is the destruction of Hamas.

00:46:02.000 The Saudis have very little... If the Saudis cared deeply about what was going on in Gaza, don't you think they'd be offering a little more humanitarian aid?

00:46:08.000 Don't you think that they would be offering, say, exit visas to anyone who wants to leave the Gaza Strip in the middle of this war?

00:46:12.000 They're not doing any of those things.

00:46:15.000 The Saudis were perfectly willing to sign on the dotted line with Israel the day Biden took office, and then he proceeded to alienate the Saudis in favor of trying to bring the Iranians into the fold.

00:46:23.000 Foolishness has consequences, always and forever.

00:46:26.000 Now, I've said before that not only does reality always win, but I root for reality, and that's true.

00:46:31.000 I do root for reality because the faster people see reality, the faster we can get to actual policy-based solutions to the problems we face.

00:46:39.000 When it comes to crime, it turns out that yelling at the cops is not going to fix crime. 0.86

00:46:42.000 When it comes to education, it turns out that teaching students idiocy about equity is not going to fix the problem. 0.89

00:46:49.000 When it comes to immigration, it turns out That political machinations in which you leave the border open while claiming the other side somehow doesn't care enough? 0.96

00:46:57.000 That is not going to fix the problem.

00:46:59.000 And when it comes to Middle East, weakness isn't going to fix the problem either. 0.87

The Ben Shapiro Show - February 06, 2024

SHOCKER: Woke Kindergarten Fails

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