The Energy Department and FBI finally admit COVID-19 probably started in a Chinese lab. Joe Biden still can t answer why he won t go to East Palestine. And the left proves that racism is just fine so long as it s against white people. Welcome to The Ben Shapiro Show, where you get straight facts about what's going on in the world and the things you need to know to make sense of it. Today's episode is a mashup of two stories: The first is a story from the Wall Street Journal about a new report from the Energy Department suggesting that the COVID pandemic originated in China. And A story from The New York Times about how the Chinese government covered up the existence of the virus for years, and kept it a secret from the public for years. And then, finally, they admit that the virus came from a lab in China, and that it s likely the result of a lab leak. And that s not even close to being the worst part of this story. It s actually pretty good, actually. Subscribe to our new podcast, The Dark Side Of, wherever you get your news and information. Subscribe and let us know what you think of it! Subscribe, rate, review, and subscribe to our newest podcast, and tell a friend about what you're listening to on your favorite podcasting platform! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and social media platforms! Connect with us on whatever platform you re listening to and share the podcast on your social media platform you care about! Thank you for listening and sharing about our new show! Ben Shapiro and Ben Shapiro on the Ben Shapiro show on social media! - - Ben Shapiro's newest podcast on the Podcasts and his new book, "The Dark Side of History" on Amazon Prime Video on the Hill? on Podchaser and TikTok on TikTok on the Podchronicity Podcast on the podchronicities on the Podcast Network? Subscribe and review us on PodChronicity on Strava on the Pitchfork and Stik on the App Store and TikCrunchy on the PODCAST & TikTok? on PODCO on the Vineyard? and PODCODE on Podcoin on the Spare Parts on The Podchival is available on iTunes Thanks for listening to Ben Shapiro s "The Biggest Podcasts of the Week?
00:00:13.000So you remember that time for like two years, you couldn't say that COVID-19 probably started in a Chinese lab.
00:00:24.000Now, the evidence was there very early on that there was a high probability that COVID-19 started in a Chinese lab.
00:00:30.000Number one, it was covered up by the Chinese government since the very earliest days.
00:00:34.000And even people who are considered sort of Mainstream establishment COVID figures were saying as much if you go all the way back to 2020.
00:00:43.000There were people who are looking at the actual genetic coding of COVID-19 and they were saying there are a lot of hallmarks here that do not look as though this is naturally changing in the bat population.
00:00:52.000In fact, no one could actually find COVID-19 in the bat population, but the going theory was that it was some rando who ate a bat or something, and that is what generated COVID-19.
00:01:01.000And in fact, we were supposed to believe that China was so wildly competent that it didn't happen at their lab, but they could find the one bat that one dude, Ozzy Osbourne style, had bit the head off of or he was eating bat soup or something.
00:01:14.000And that is the reason why COVID-19 broke out among the population.
00:01:17.000Now, the thing that we know, by the way, is that the state of China was actually Prohibiting information about the virus, which they knew about, in like October of 2019, like literally months in advance, and if China weren't a repressive totalitarian communist dictatorship, then COVID-19 probably doesn't break out of its borders, and it certainly doesn't kill millions of people.
00:01:37.000Instead, China lied, and literally millions of people died because China lied.
00:01:41.000And it turns out now, of course, that the most likely scenario for COVID-19 is that it was developed in the Wuhan lab and that it leaked outside.
00:01:50.000Now, this has started to become sort of a more mainstream idea over the course of the last year and a half or so.
00:01:55.000You had even people like Jon Stewart doing rants on late night television about how there's literally one institute of virology in the entire area.
00:02:02.000I mean, we're talking like the global area and just happens to be in Wuhan.
00:02:06.000And this is exactly the epicenter of this pandemic.
00:02:09.000But you'll remember that from the very earliest days, if you mentioned this sort of thing, you were considered out of bounds.
00:02:15.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S.
00:02:18.000Energy Department has concluded that the COVID pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
00:02:26.000The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
00:02:35.000The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic's origin.
00:02:40.000The Energy Department now joins the FBI in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese lab.
00:02:46.000Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge it was likely the result of a natural transmission.
00:02:53.000The Energy Department's conclusion is the result of new intelligence.
00:02:56.000It's significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S.
00:03:00.000national laboratories, some of which actually conduct advanced biological research.
00:03:05.000Now, the Energy Department did make the judgment with quote unquote, low confidence.
00:03:08.000The FBI previously came to a conclusion the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with a moderate confidence and still holds to that view.
00:03:17.000Now again, the other possibilities seem a lot less likely.
00:03:21.000Because there is no train of transmission that shows that COVID-19, a version of it existed in the bat population, then it sort of gradually became human oriented and then was transmissible via humans.
00:03:33.000The National Intelligence Council, which conducts long-term strategic analysis, and four agencies, which officials declined to identify, still assess with low confidence the virus came about through natural transmission.
00:03:43.000Now, this was not a biological weapons program per se, but it turns out that when you are screwing around with viruses, and when you are China, And you essentially unleash a worldwide Chernobyl, that is quite a bad thing.
00:03:55.000Now remember, at the very beginning of the pandemic, there were in fact scientists who were writing to Anthony Fauci and saying to him, this thing looks engineered.
00:04:04.000And then, Anthony Fauci took a leading role in preventing the information from being disseminated.
00:04:12.000Because he was of the belief, apparently, that if that information got out, that would endanger our relationship with China, that this would somehow Blow back on him, because the NIH had been providing, obviously, funding to Chinese laboratories, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for what he says was not gain-of-function research, but was clearly a form of gain-of-function research.
00:04:35.000The Intercept reported, all the way back in January of 2022, that Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform released a letter painting a damning picture of U.S.
00:04:43.000government officials wrestling with whether the coronavirus may have leaked out of a lab they were funding, acknowledging it may have, and then keeping the discussion from spilling out into public view.
00:04:50.000There's a letter signed by James Comer of Kentucky and Jim Jordan of Ohio.
00:04:53.000and was followed by pages of notes on emails that were first obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by BuzzFeed and the Washington Post, but then were heavily redacted in June 2021.
00:05:00.000Those redacted emails included the agenda for a February 1, 2020 telephone conference between Anthony Fauci, his then-boss at the NIH, Francis Collins, and several of the world's leading virologists.
00:05:11.000The communications contained extensive notes summarizing what was said during the call, but their substance was hidden during the time.
00:05:17.000Apparently, on that call, virologist Michael Farzan and Robert Gehry told Fauci and Collins the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan lab.
00:05:24.000It might have been genetically engineered, the transcription of Gehry's notes suggests, but this now seems unlikely.
00:05:28.000Another possibility was that it could have been involved in the lab through a process known as serial passage.
00:05:33.000The two methods represent two different ideas behind the so-called lab leak hypothesis.
00:05:38.000Well, not long after that particular call, Actually, the day before the call, Scripps Research infectious disease expert Christian Anderson had warned Fauci the virus might have been engineered in a lab, and they agreed to have a call.
00:05:49.000Well, not long after the call, Anderson then wrote a paper in Nature magazine titled, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.
00:05:57.000And one of those possible transmission vectors was, in fact, the lab leak.
00:06:02.000On February 2nd, Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease expert and director of Wellcome, sent around notes, including to Fauci and Collins, summarizing what some of the scientists had said on the call.
00:06:11.000And apparently, again, this issue came up and Anthony Fauci was encouraged not to actually say anything about the lab leak hypothesis and in fact to downplay the lab leak hypothesis as they discussed what to present to the public.
00:06:24.000The scientists determined questions of potential lab origin might prove more trouble than they were worth.
00:06:28.000Ron Fauci, a virologist at the Erasmus MC Center for Viroscience in the Netherlands, said, given the evidence presented and the discussions around it, I would conclude a follow-up discussion on the possible origin of COVID-19 would be of much interest.
00:06:39.000Years earlier, Fauci's gain-of-function research had brought the discipline under fire for a 2011 experiment in which he infected ferrets with avian influenza virus, allowing it to become airborne and infect mammals.
00:06:49.000But Fauci wrote, Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general, and science in China in particular.
00:07:00.000The science would be harmed if people actually talked about this stuff.
00:07:02.000China would be harmed if people actually talked about this stuff.
00:07:06.000And then it turns out that Fauci and Collins looked like they were putting some backdoor pressure on people not to talk about this sort of stuff.
00:07:14.000In fact, there was an email from Anthony Fauci to Peter Daszak, who was involved in EcoHealth Alliance, which was the sort of cutout by which the NIH supported the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in which Fauci said, thanks for your kind note.
00:07:28.000What was the kind note from Peter Daszak?
00:07:30.000The kind note was, thanks for shutting down the discussion about whether this was a lab leak.
00:07:36.000He said, I want to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators for publicly standing up and stating that scientific evidence supports a natural origin, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:07:45.000From my perspective, your comments are brave.
00:07:47.000Coming from your trusted voice will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus's origins.
00:07:51.000So again, Anthony Fauci and company were working in order to shut down the lab leak hypothesis.
00:07:56.000And as we'll talk about in a second, this attempt to quash any discussion about whether this thing came from a Chinese lab extended to the entire realm of social media, as well as to the legacy media as well.
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00:09:29.000But another criticism is that you and other public health officials were not transparent enough at points along the way about what you knew and what you didn't know about COVID.
00:09:43.000That is total nonsense that we weren't transparent about it.
00:09:46.000What the public needed to know, and perhaps we could have done a better job, is that we were dealing with a dynamic, evolving situation.
00:09:55.000What the public needed to know, what the public needed to know, but this is always the question for people like Anthony Fauci is what you needed to know.
00:10:01.000And so what are the real question is, why exactly were they so focused on shutting down the lab leak hypothesis when it turns out that there's really good evidence that the lab leak hypothesis is the most probable hypothesis?
00:10:11.000Well, there are a few different reasons.
00:10:36.000It also means that when you are funding laboratories that do not have proper containment facilities, you're upping the risk that something like this will happen.
00:10:43.000So that is one reason is cover your ass.
00:10:44.000The other reason is because every major administration Over the course of the last 30 years has essentially been doing the work of China when it comes to public relations.
00:10:56.000And we didn't want anybody thinking badly of China, despite the fact that China unleashed this virus on the rest of the world.
00:11:03.000We were scared of people knowing that China is in fact a nefarious and egregious force in the world responsible for millions of deaths.
00:11:10.000We were afraid that that might undermine whatever negotiations we had going with China.
00:11:13.000So it's imperative that the American public not be even allowed to discuss the issue.
00:11:18.000That's the other reason that this thing was swept under the rug and purposefully swept under the rug by both our health authorities, as well as members of the federal government and the media.
00:11:25.000And it was the entire media, by the way, because you were called a conspiracy theorist if you talked about the lab leak hypothesis.
00:11:31.000You're also called a racist, by the way.
00:11:32.000This is always the weirdest thing to me.
00:11:34.000It's apparently it was more racist to suggest that China had blown it in a lab and the virus had escaped from the lab.
00:11:42.000That apparently was more racist than saying it was a random Chinese dude eating a bat.
00:11:46.000Which, I gotta say, the last one sounds more damaging to China, random dude eating a bat, than you guys released it from a lab by accident.
00:11:57.000But, again, the entire media decided on this narrative and you were literally not allowed to talk about it on places like Twitter or YouTube or Facebook.
00:12:28.000Or how about this one from the Washington Post?
00:12:31.000Headline from the Washington Post, Paulina Firozzi, February 17th, 2020.
00:12:36.000Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.
00:12:40.000Well, scientists disputing, I mean, presumably there's lots of disputation inside scientific circles, but it was a coronavirus fringe theory, a fringe conspiracy theory back in February 2020, at the exact time, by the way, that there were people writing to Anthony Fauci and having phone calls with Anthony Fauci talking about the possibility that this was, in fact, leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:13:00.000Or if you don't like that one, how about this one from The New York Times?
00:13:04.000This one again, February 17th, 2020, same exact day.
00:13:07.000Senator Tom Cotton repeats fringe theory of coronavirus origins.
00:13:10.000Because you weren't supposed to talk about any of this.
00:13:14.000Scientific American has become just a parody of itself between telling you that boys can be girls and girls can be boys and suggesting that John Fetterman's brain is fine.
00:13:23.000Scientific America has just blown out.
00:13:25.000Scientific American has blown out any brand credibility it ever had.
00:13:35.000From Steven Lewandowski, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Bristol, Peter Jacobs, Climate Scientist and Strategic Science Advisor at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Stuart Neal, Professor of Virology and Head of the Department of Infectious Disease at King's College London.
00:13:49.000And the headline was, quote, The Lab Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.
00:13:55.000Virus origin stories have always been prone to conspiracy theories, they say.
00:13:59.000COVID disinformation has threatened research and lives.
00:14:02.000Again, the idea was you are threatening the science.
00:15:10.000It's truly impressive how they've destroyed themselves in the course of just a few years here.
00:15:16.000Just because they had to cling to that patina of expertise, even when their expertise did not match up to their actual performance.
00:15:22.000Honestly, the quote-unquote elites in our society, the people who consider themselves your masters, the people who consider themselves the people who ought to tell you what to think, and tell you what to do, and ought to be able to regulate you into silence, and ought to be able to silence all the channels of dissent, all those people, they've exercised more control over the past three years than any time in my lifetime, and they've done a poorer job than at any time in my lifetime.
00:16:01.000Because the fact is that if you're like me and you had some level of baseline credulity about some of our institutions, that credulity is gone.
00:16:14.000Speaking of not trusting the people in control.
00:16:17.000This might make you think about our government's fiscal policy.
00:16:20.000The debt ceiling has now exceeded $31.4 trillion.
00:16:23.000We're aiming, in terms of national debt, up at the $34-35 trillion mark at this point.
00:16:28.000To dig our country out of this mountain of debt, eventually, every single taxpayer in America is going to have to write a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
00:16:34.000Well, that really means one of three things.
00:16:36.000Increase in taxes, economic stagnation, or inflation.
00:17:09.000Text Ben to 98-98-98, claim your free info kit on gold, and again, talk to one of their precious metals specialists, ask all of your questions, get all of your answers, and then diversify the way a smart investor would.
00:17:21.000Okay, meanwhile, speaking of people who have blown out their institutional credibility, The media like to claim that they are the experts when it comes to the race debate.
00:17:36.000They're the ones who will tell you what is appropriate speech and what is not appropriate speech. So just as in the scientific context, they will tell you what you're allowed to talk about.
00:17:46.000It's now no, no talking about that. You weren't allowed to talk about the problems of transmission despite the vaccine.
00:17:53.000You weren't allowed to talk about natural immunity.
00:17:54.000There are like a thousand things you were not allowed to talk about when it came to COVID because they were the experts and you're not the experts.
00:18:00.000They feel the same way about basic social interactions.
00:18:03.000There are certain things you are just not allowed to say.
00:18:05.000There are certain things that you are not allowed to.
00:18:07.000And conversely, there are certain things that you are allowed to say and you are allowed to do if your skin is of a particular color.
00:18:23.000Do not treat one racial group differently than you would treat another racial group.
00:18:27.000Do not promote the idea that a group is worse or better based on skin color.
00:18:32.000This is very basic stuff, but the left doesn't actually hold to those standards.
00:18:36.000The left doesn't hold to those standards, not remotely.
00:18:38.000There were a couple of big controversies about this over the weekend.
00:18:42.000So, the first big controversy was Scott Adams.
00:18:45.000So Scott Adams, who is the creator of Dilbert, he had an unfortunate clip that went viral because he was talking about a poll from Rasmussen.
00:18:55.000And this poll from Rasmussen is super disturbing.
00:18:57.000The poll from Rasmussen polled Americans on the question of, quote, it's okay to be white.
00:19:59.000Which is disturbing, because if you had 26 percent of white Americans saying it's not OK to be black, that would be incredibly disturbing and super problematic and it would spell, you know, some real problems in our public.
00:20:11.000So Scott Adams decided to go off on it, but the way that he went off on it was in the dumbest possible way.
00:20:16.000So here was Scott Adams talking about this.
00:20:19.000So if nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll, that's a hate group.
00:20:33.000And I don't want to have anything to do with them.
00:20:35.000And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people.
00:21:03.000Also agree with that's a terrible racist thing to say.
00:21:07.000Also, if you replaced every word that says black in that sentence with white in that sentence, the mainstream media will not only cheer you, they will give you an op-ed slot at the New York Times.
00:21:16.000Herein lies a major problem in American society.
00:21:18.000We'll get to that major problem momentarily.
00:21:29.000And when we do, we want to make sure that our assets are disposed of, not by the government, not by some idiot bureaucrat.
00:21:33.000They're disposed of the way that you want your assets disposed of, including, by the way, really important things like who's going to take care of your kids.
00:21:39.000This is why my wife and I actually have a will.
00:21:41.000But according to a recent poll, 62% of Americans who think about their own death a lot of the time don't have a will, which is kind of like being afraid that your house is going to burn down, but you don't actually bother to go get some homeowners insurance.
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00:22:28.000Okay, so, Scott Adams says something that pretty much everybody acknowledges is racist.
00:22:32.000Right, which is, he says that that poll shows that black people are a hate group, seems to be what he is saying there.
00:22:38.000Right, that seems to be what he is saying, that there's a poll and it shows that only 53% of black Americans think it's okay to be white, which means 47% of black Americans think it's not okay to be white.
00:22:46.000And so there's a direct quote, quote, if nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people, according to this poll, that's a hate group.
00:22:51.000I don't want anything to do with them.
00:23:10.000So now we're going to play a quick game of reverse the races.
00:23:13.000OK, this quick game is useful because, as we'll discuss in just a moment, the left is totally fine with racism so long as it actually is coming from one particular group against another particular group.
00:23:24.000You want to know why there are so many people in America who believe that it's OK to be racist against white people?
00:23:29.000It's because of the media's treatment of these particular issues.
00:23:32.000Okay, so here is, we're going to just read Scott Adams' full quote here.
00:23:36.000And we're going to read his entire quote based on, by reversing the race.
00:23:42.000Quote, if nearly half of all whites are not okay with black people, according to this poll, not according to me, that's a hate group.
00:23:49.000That's a hate group and I don't want anything to do with them.
00:23:52.000Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to black people is to get the hell away from white people.
00:24:03.000That is a direct quote from Scott Adams.
00:24:05.000Dilbert has been canceled from every major newspaper in the United States.
00:24:09.000It's a really, really bad quote from him when it's about black people.
00:24:12.000If it were about black people treating white people, if the races were reversed, the entire media would be putting this guy on the front page of the 1619 Project.
00:24:21.000If this were a black person saying that half of white people are not okay with black people, the best thing you can do is get away from the white people, that person is now speaking on major college campuses.
00:24:30.000That person is being given op-ed slots over at the New York Times.
00:24:34.000That person is being given a Hulu deal.
00:24:37.000And when it comes to racism in the United States, there is, in fact, a massive double standard.
00:24:41.000Some of us believe racism is bad across the board, and then others of us on the left, we tend to believe that racism is OK, so long as that racism is being performed by people who are not white against people who are white.
00:28:13.000In other words, racism is totally fine with the left, but only toward one group.
00:28:19.000I shouldn't say only toward one group.
00:28:20.000There are certain types of racism that are totally fine from the left, depending on whether you are higher or lower on the intersectional pyramid.
00:28:26.000So if you are a white person and you're anti-Asian, that's racism.
00:28:30.000If you're a black person and you're anti-Asian, we don't talk about that sort of stuff.
00:28:34.000If you are a white person, you're a white supremacist and you hate Jews, we talk about that a lot.
00:28:37.000If you are a black person and you're beating the shit out of a Jew in Williamsburg, that does not get any media coverage whatsoever.
00:28:47.000We need to stop talking about that right now.
00:28:50.000All of which suggests that for the left, unfortunately, racism is not actually the problem.
00:28:54.000It is a power game, which is what it is.
00:28:58.000The left believes in a deconstructionist vision of society in which all words and all societal forces are merely guises for power.
00:29:04.000And so when you say to yourself, wait a second, this makes no sense.
00:29:08.000And just on a pure human level, it makes no sense that you're okay with racism against white people, but you're super anti-racism against black people.
00:29:19.000They'll say that racism is only possible from the powerful toward the powerless.
00:29:23.000So if you have people who are less powerful, who actually hold some of the most egregious views in society, if you have those people, if those people exist, it doesn't matter.
00:30:07.000Which means it's really just about the power, it's not about the thought whatsoever.
00:30:12.000Which is why, again, it doesn't excuse us from holding a standard as good human beings for what racism is and is not and holding everybody to that same standard.
00:30:19.000It does mean that what the left is actually doing when they do this sort of stuff They're undermining whatever credibility they supposedly have on these issues in the first place.
00:30:28.000And meanwhile, speaking of people who have been ousted from polite society, Libs of TikTok, Chaya Raychik, has now been informed by the software company Slack that it permanently suspended her from being able to use their services over a non-specified violation.
00:30:43.000Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon, who's a top supporter of Libs of TikTok, posted a screenshot of the email the company sent explaining their decision not to do business with Libs of TikTok.
00:31:22.000It's just clips of people saying things, and that's enough to get you banned from Slack.
00:31:27.000Raycheck wrote, quote, Slack is angry that an account is working to protect childhood innocence by educating people about mutilation surgeries, porn in schools, and inappropriate adult entertainment being presented to kids.
00:31:39.000Apparently, Dylan added an update after I tweeted that Slack had suspended libs of TikTok.
00:31:43.000I got a reply from them saying they were looking into it.
00:31:45.000Sounds like they might do the right thing, but instead of reinstating the account, they deleted this tweet that said that they were looking into it.
00:31:52.000So, again, major corporations, the institutional powers that be, they are perfectly happy to shut you down based on your politics.
00:32:00.000This is why you must have the right politics.
00:32:01.000And they will decide what the right politics are.
00:33:22.000Marxism suggests that the system defines the individual.
00:33:24.000That the system has created us to be a certain way.
00:33:27.000And thus, the only way to reshape human nature is to remake the system.
00:33:30.000And whatever you have to do in order to remake the system, in order to give power to the powerless, in order to restructure society's hierarchies, this you must do.
00:33:39.000And if that includes lying, if it includes double standards, if it includes saying that certain people can speak and other people cannot, that's totally fine.
00:33:47.000And then you wonder why institutional trust is gone.
00:33:49.000Institutional trust in those sorts of people should be gone.
00:33:51.000Those people should not be running institutions in the first place.
00:33:54.000Now, speaking of people who should not be running institutions in the first place, we're going to get to the Biden administration in East Palestine first.
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00:34:20.000You can pray alongside Mark Wahlberg or Jim Caviezel, even some world-class athletes.
00:34:25.000You can access the number one Christian podcast, Bible in a Year, with Father Mike Schmitz on Hallow.
00:34:29.000Now, I'm obviously not a person who partakes in Lent, but it's a powerful spiritual time for a lot of Christians, and I've always encouraged Christians, go back to church, pray more, get in touch with your godly values.
00:34:38.000Try Halo for three months free at Halo.com slash Shapiro.
00:35:45.000All righty, meanwhile, Joe Biden is still not going to East Palestine, Ohio.
00:35:49.000And then there's really no reason for him not to go.
00:35:51.000The media is in full defense mode of Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg arriving there like three weeks too late.
00:35:57.000I am amused by people whose entire job is to just do photo ops, now telling us that photo ops aren't important.
00:36:02.000So Pete Buttigieg, who is a walking photo op, that is all he is.
00:36:05.000He was the mayor of like the fourth largest city in Indiana.
00:36:08.000You're talking like the fourth largest city in New York or the fourth largest city in California.
00:36:12.000You're talking about the fourth largest city in Indiana, which means that there are like 150,000 people.
00:36:18.000Here is Pete Buttigieg, who is a walking photo op, explaining that going, not going to East Palestine, it really is not about, in any way, shape or form, you know, the image of it.
00:36:29.000So much information and frankly, so much misinformation thrown at this community and thrown at this situation that a lot of them are asking who they can even trust.
00:36:38.000And it's so important to continue to make sure that they can get good, accurate information about the things they care about most, which isn't national politics or who looks good or who looks bad.
00:36:51.000It's continuing to know that their air, water and soil are going to be safe, that their homes are going to be safe.
00:36:58.000That's what anybody would want to know in this country.
00:38:39.000I will say his circle of references is rather limited, but underlying so much of the angst from the left about the treatment of East Palestine is the fact that a lot of people on the left ain't no fond of the kind of people who are in East Palestine.
00:39:39.000By the way, that has been thoroughly debunked by the National Transportation Safety Board.
00:39:43.000They said it had nothing to do with the Trump regulations that this thing happened.
00:39:46.000One of the things that happens when you have such an overarching government that is supposedly in every nook and cranny of our lives is that we actually believe that the government can protect us from literally every bad thing happening.
00:40:15.000OK, what you can say is that their reaction to the disaster in East Palestine has been absolutely lackluster because it was.
00:40:22.000And maybe one of the reasons it was so, I mean, it wasn't Flint, Michigan.
00:40:26.000In Flint, Michigan, you got the President of the United States flying over there to talk about lead in the water.
00:40:30.000Maybe it has to do with the demographics of people who tend to support Democrats versus the people who tend to support Republicans in East Palestine, which won 72% for Donald Trump.
00:40:42.000China is apparently now proposing some sort of peace deal in Ukraine.
00:40:48.000Vladimir Zelensky, who is the president of Ukraine, according to Politico, cautiously welcomed Beijing's efforts toward ending the war in Ukraine, said he'd like to meet with Xi Jinping to discuss Chinese proposals.
00:40:58.000Speaking at a press conference in Kiev on Friday to mark the first anniversary of Moscow's invasion, Zelensky said he was open to considering some aspects of the 12-point position paper published by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
00:41:07.000Both NATO and the EU have criticized the initiative, with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen saying that China has taken side in the Ukraine conflict.
00:41:14.000Beijing claims that it is neutral, but it also says that it has a no-limits relationship with Moscow.
00:41:19.000Zelensky said that a meeting with Xi could be useful to both countries and for global security.
00:41:23.000It's a smart move by Zelensky to at least take the meeting because he wants to show that he is willing to at least come to the table, perhaps in a way that Vladimir Putin is not.
00:41:32.000With that said, the United States can't seem to make up its mind, this administration, on whether they want to go balls-to-the-wall or whether they want to pull back.
00:41:43.000Graduated escalation in Vietnam was the idea that if we gradually kept upping the amount of force that we were using in Vietnam, eventually the Viet Cong would surrender.
00:41:51.000And then, after Nixon took office, he started obviously on a wide-scale bombing campaign against the Viet Cong, and he forced them to the table with overwhelming force.
00:42:03.000of the Ukraine war is put serious military pressure on Vladimir Putin to force him to the table, then you have to give the Ukrainians everything they want. If the strategy is stalemate until we can draw this line properly, then you actually have to make it clear that that is your strategy. The problem is the administration is not clear at all about what its strategy is.
00:42:20.000So they're kind of half-assing it. They'll be on the one hand, they'll say things like we have to, we are here for the long haul. We will look at the Ukraine, everything, not F20, not F16s, everything except for those, those particular, no, no, not that you can't have it both ways.
00:42:35.000Graduated escalation is kind of the worst of both worlds because it leads to prolonged conflict.
00:42:40.000That is the nature of graduated escalation.
00:42:43.000And so you have a couple of conflicting sentiments inside the same administration.
00:42:47.000So over the weekend, Lloyd Austin, the defense secretary, he admitted that this thing is probably not going to end with just Ukraine shoving Russia off the board.
00:42:56.000He said it'll probably end with some sort of negotiation.
00:42:59.000I want to talk more about the weaponry in a moment, but when you look at this and you're making your assessments, do you think this ends with negotiations or does it end on the battlefield?
00:43:09.000Most likely it will end with some sort of negotiation.
00:43:14.000And what the Ukrainians are interested in is getting the Russians out of their sovereign territory.
00:43:22.000And I think that's probably going to be their going in point, but I'll let the Ukrainians speak for themselves.
00:43:30.000And so he says, you know, it'll probably end with some sort of negotiation, but the Ukrainians get to speak for themselves.
00:43:39.000On the one hand, you have Austin who says it will end negotiation.
00:43:43.000On the other hand, you have Jake Sullivan saying, well, it's really up to Ukraine to decide if recapturing Crimea means military victory or not.
00:43:48.000Is it, though, since you're the one signing the check?
00:43:51.000I'm unaware that this has ever been the case, like literally at any time, that the sponsor state allows the client state, right now Ukraine is the client state, the United States is the sponsor state, that the client state gets to decide the nature of the end of the war without reference at all to the sponsor state.
00:44:07.000Again, if you want to say this, if you want to make Jake Sullivan's case, you give them every bit of support they could possibly want in order to achieve whatever their goal would be.
00:44:18.000Or alternatively, you actually have in your mind what you think a negotiation should look like, in which case you probably should hold back.
00:44:22.000But they're doing both at the same time.
00:44:24.000On the one hand, they're like Ukraine should be able to do whatever they want.
00:44:26.000Also, we're not going to give them the weapons they need.
00:44:27.000It's a very, very weird kind of take on this.
00:44:32.000I wanted you to sort of give a yes or no answer to this.
00:44:34.000If Ukraine decided that victory means recapturing Crimea militarily, would the United States support that?
00:44:45.000Dan, I can't give a yes or no answer to what is a hypothetical question.
00:44:49.000Right now, what President Zelensky is focused on is getting into the best possible position on the battlefield so that he can be in the best possible position at the negotiating table.
00:44:59.000And he spoke as recently as this week about diplomacy.
00:45:25.000Then, by the way, Dana Bash did ask Jake Sullivan, you know, so are you turning down the F-16s out of fear, right?
00:45:29.000If the idea is that you need to give the Ukrainians whatever they want, then why aren't you just giving them the F-16s they're asking for?
00:45:35.000I know you said that Ukraine doesn't have the training and the maintenance capacity to use the jets, but is the real reason you're not giving Ukraine these jets because you're trying to balance how far to go in supporting Ukraine without antagonizing Russia too much?
00:45:53.000The real reason, Dana, is that we are taking a very hard look at what it is that Ukraine needs for the immediate phase of the war that we're in.
00:46:01.000And this phase of the war requires tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, artillery, tactical air defense systems, so that Ukrainian fighters can retake territory that Russia currently occupies.
00:46:15.000F-16s are a question for a later time, and that's why President Biden said that, for now, he's not moving forward with those.
00:46:23.000I mean, they're not a question for a later time.
00:46:25.000Literally, Ukraine asked for them now.
00:46:29.000Because again, it's always leading from behind with this administration.
00:46:31.000The idea that they're the ones who kind of mobilize the coalition is not true in the first place.
00:46:34.000It was their failure to provide Ukraine the weapons that Ukraine actually asked for before the war began and that led Russia to invade, at least in part.
00:46:40.000So not a shock that they still don't quite know what they're doing, which means, in all likelihood, a prolonged war.
00:46:45.000What you saw in Vietnam and graduated escalation leads to prolonged conflict.
00:46:49.000It does not draw conflict quicker to a close.
00:46:51.000Meanwhile, Joe Biden, you know, that Ukrainian reset didn't seem like it's really helped a whole hell of a lot.
00:46:56.000Doesn't seem like it's helped a whole hell of a lot.
00:46:58.000Well, if that's not helping him, the economy certainly is not going to help him right now.
00:47:02.000Investors right now are bracing for a surge in market volatility.
00:47:05.000Warren Buffett is warning about economic stagnation and inflation as of today.
00:47:09.000And according to the Wall Street Journal, fear is creeping back into the stock market to protect against a potential downturn.
00:47:13.000Traders are scooping up hedges at the fastest clip since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:47:17.000Hedges are essentially a way of preventing yourself from losing a lot of money.
00:47:22.000You sell a hedge to hedge against the possibility that the stock goes down.
00:47:31.000Even Joe Biden is saying it's understandable why people are down, economically speaking.
00:47:36.000So I think things are a little out of whack.
00:47:38.000And I don't blame people for being down.
00:47:40.000You know, when you have a year or two years of the pandemic, kids out of school, the mental health problems in the country are seriously increased, especially among young people.
00:47:51.000Some things are, for example, feeling down about employment.
00:47:58.000Inflation is still higher than it should be.
00:48:01.000And, you know, everything from gasoline prices to a war going on in Ukraine.
00:48:07.000I mean, so I can't think of a time when there's been greater uncertainty.
00:48:13.000Notwithstanding the fact we've created 800,000 manufacturing jobs.
00:48:16.000We're better off than virtually any other major nation in the world economically.
00:48:20.000But it's understandable why people are just down.
00:48:24.000It's understandable why people are just down is the campaign commercial that Republicans have been waiting for for this entire presidency.
00:48:30.000It's understandable why people are down is like that's just a ready-made campaign commercial.
00:48:35.000And it's also why Joe Biden will be in serious trouble in 2024 if Republicans nominate somebody who doesn't alienate every independent from here until the end of time.
00:48:44.000All right, it's time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:51:10.000So Ronna Romney McDaniel, she's doing her best here.
00:51:13.000And I will say that she's now saying that in order for any of the Republicans to debate, they have to pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee, which seems like fairly reasonable to me.
00:51:23.000It seems like a reasonable thing to say that if you want to debate on this party stage, you have to pledge to support this party's nominee.
00:51:30.000Otherwise, like, go about your business.
00:51:31.000Here is Romney McDaniel saying that even that includes Donald Trump.
00:51:35.000So if Donald Trump refuses to say that he's going to support the eventual nominee, then he doesn't get to debate.
00:51:40.000Anybody getting on the Republican National Committee debate stage should be able to say, I will support the will of the voters and the eventual nominee of our party.
00:51:47.000I want you to listen to what former President Donald Trump said a couple of weeks ago in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on this very topic.
00:51:58.000If you're not the nominee, will you support whoever the GOP nominee is?
00:52:43.000I don't think there's any upside in it for him if he were to do so.
00:52:45.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:52:47.000So Bryan Cranston is a tremendous actor and also an idiot, which those two things go together pretty well, is the truth.
00:52:58.000There are a lot of actors who are idiots.
00:53:00.000They're very good at inhabiting the emotions of the characters that they play.
00:53:04.000They're tremendous at reading lines, and also their thoughts are quite stupid.
00:53:08.000And there's a halo effect that applies to an enormous number of people in society, where if people are famous, then we give them extra credibility that they don't actually have in particular fields.
00:54:06.000But in any case, he sat down with, with Bryan Cranston, and Cranston decided that he was going to talk about how Make America Great Again is inherently racist.
00:55:14.000And there's so many actors and actresses, or actors as we call them now because we're not allowed to say actresses because men and women don't exist anymore, who are doing the work.
00:55:20.000So Sally Field, she's a terrific actress.
00:55:24.000She won a Lifetime Screen Actors Guild Award last night.
00:55:28.000And Sally Field, in accepting her award, had to proclaim her privilege malice style.
00:55:33.000She got up there and she talked about how she grew up in Pasadena as a white girl.
00:55:37.000And that means that all of her challenges are as known.
00:55:39.000All of her challenges are completely of no consequence whatsoever.
00:56:47.000And the notion that Brian Cranston puts out there that if you believe in make America great again, this means because make America great again.
00:57:07.000There's an entire movie called Gentleman's Agreement that actually won Best Picture at the Oscars in 1947.
00:57:19.000It won Best Picture, starring Gregory Peck, and the entire thing was about the treatment of Jews in 1930s, 1940s America.
00:57:26.000Was America not great during the 1940s?
00:57:28.000America was pretty great during the 1940s.
00:57:30.000I don't mean like it was great for every single person or for every group it was equivalently great.
00:57:35.000But America has always been great because our founding principles were great.
00:57:40.000And if you compare the United States to other countries, America is the most phenomenal beacon of light in human history.
00:57:46.000Saying make America great again means make America great on the world stage, for example, or go back to America's founding ideals, for example, or go back to the notion that America's constitutional rights are good.