The Ben Shapiro Show

00:00:00.000 The Washington Post issues one of the worst retractions in modern media history.

00:00:04.000 The media justified Joe Biden's absence from press conferences and the Vatican shocks the world by, you know, being Catholic.

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

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00:00:24.000 First, a reminder, the government is now blowing out the spending.

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00:01:41.000 Alrighty, so the Washington Post has now beclowned itself in epic fashion.

00:01:45.000 The Washington Post is an extraordinarily biased source.

00:01:48.000 It has been an extraordinarily biased source for many, many years, but I have to say, this may be the worst major media correction I have ever seen in my life.

00:01:55.000 It's pretty astonishing.

00:01:56.000 So, you'll recall that way back in December, the Washington Post reported a call The call was supposed to be between President Trump and a Georgia investigator, okay?

00:02:09.000 And that Georgia investigator, he apparently told, according to the Washington Post, that this Georgia investigator would be, quote, a national hero if they found the fraud.

00:02:18.000 He apparently encouraged this Georgia investigator to, quote, unquote, find the fraud and said they would be a national hero if they did so.

00:02:26.000 Okay, now it turns out that those quotes were entirely fabricated, like top to bottom, made up.

00:02:32.000 According to the Washington Post correction, quote, two months after publication of this story, the Georgia Secretary of State released an audio recording of President Donald Trump's December phone call with the state's top elections investigator.

00:02:42.000 The recording revealed that the Post misquoted Trump's comments on the call, based on information provided by a source.

00:02:48.000 So in other words, they talked to a single source who was supposedly privy to the phone call.

00:02:52.000 That person made up quotes.

00:02:54.000 The Washington Post simply quoted that source without any sort of actual sourcing.

00:02:58.000 And then when the phone call broke, as in like a couple of months after the story, when it broke in February, March, then it turned out none of this was on the phone call and the Washington Post had to retract basically the center of the story.

00:03:12.000 Now, this is a separate phone call from the one that happened that we all heard the audio of of President Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State.

00:03:18.000 At the time, I said it was easy to mischaracterize that conversation as Trump telling Raffensperger that he needed to find votes somewhere that were fraudulent.

00:03:26.000 It was the opposite, right?

00:03:27.000 What he was saying in that phone call was he believed, I think baselessly, that there were a bunch of votes in Georgia that were improper and that Raffensperger was ignoring that evidence and he was encouraging to go find the evidence that Trump thought existed, but You could read it the other way.

00:03:40.000 But something that certainly never happened that we know at this point is that Trump never said that you would be a quote-unquote national hero if you find the fraud.

00:03:48.000 He didn't tell the investigator to find the fraud or say that she would be a quote national hero if she did so.

00:03:53.000 Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, asserting she would find dishonesty there.

00:03:58.000 He also told her she had the most important job in the country right now.

00:04:01.000 The headline and text of the Post report have now been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump, the newspaper says.

00:04:07.000 I mean, you know how dangerous that is?

00:04:09.000 Seriously, like, as a matter of journalism, you know how crazy it is that you had quotes in a headline that were attributed to the President of the United States based on a single unnamed source?

00:04:18.000 And it turns out that it was just a lie.

00:04:19.000 It was just made up.

00:04:21.000 The correction comes days after the Wall Street Journal obtained audio of the December call between Trump and the investigator.

00:04:26.000 Trump told Francis Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia Secretary of State's office, quote, when the right answer comes out, you'll be praised.

00:04:32.000 Watson reportedly responded, I can assure you that our team and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, we're only interested in the truth and finding information based on the facts.

00:04:39.000 The original Post report, according to The Hill, shook the political world just days after the January 5th runoff elections in Georgia, a contest both Republican senators lost, giving Democrats the majority in the upper chamber.

00:04:49.000 The original Post report was covered widely by many media outlets, including The Hill, which has also updated its report on the Trump call.

00:04:55.000 Hey, now, here is the thing that's amazing.

00:04:57.000 You will remember that there were other outlets that then confirmed the Post's reporting.

00:05:03.000 So what happened is the Post reported stuff that wasn't true.

00:05:05.000 And then it turns out that they had to walk that back.

00:05:08.000 But at the time, after the Post reported that Trump had said, find the fraud and you'll be a national hero if you do so, At the time, there were other outlets that confirmed the reporting.

00:05:18.000 And that led people who watch the media to say, OK, well, if you have a bunch of outlets that are now confirming the same story, well, now you can pretty much guarantee that the story is true.

00:05:27.000 Except what if that's not true?

00:05:29.000 What if the way that the media now do business when there is a Republican president is they find an anonymous source.

00:05:33.000 That anonymous source then tells their story to The Washington Post.

00:05:36.000 And then that same exact anonymous source goes over to CBS News and says that exact same untrue story.

00:05:41.000 And then CBS News says, based on our source, we can also confirm that we have heard that the story is true.

00:05:47.000 So basically, you now have a single source who is dictating news to a wide variety of mainstream media outlets.

00:05:53.000 And because these mainstream media outlets are granting these people the privilege of speaking on background, meaning anonymously, this means there is no way to confirm whether you have more than one source confirming the story is true.

00:06:04.000 Normally, when you have the Washington Post make a report, and then the New York Times confirms that report, the assumption is that there is one source for the New York Times and one source for the Washington Post, and so multiple sources have now double-sourced.

00:06:15.000 Double-sourcing is the way that journalism is supposed to work.

00:06:17.000 You're supposed to have two sources who corroborate a report, not just one.

00:06:21.000 Okay, but the way that the media now work is one anonymous source goes to the Washington Post and says something that's untrue.

00:06:26.000 That same person, because they've now been quoted anonymously in the Washington Post, the same person now goes to the New York Times, tells the exact same story, and the New York Times says, we can confirm the Washington Post's reporting.

00:06:36.000 But can you?

00:06:37.000 Because apparently you're now, like how many stories have been laundered into multiple outlets by one person?

00:06:43.000 I'm sure that this has happened multiple times.

00:06:45.000 If this happened one time, it happened many times.

00:06:48.000 According to the Daily Wire, Real Clear Investigation senior writer Mark Hemingway says this kind of mistake is beyond serious.

00:06:54.000 There's zero accountability in major corporate media and they continually insist they're the ones holding the line on the truth.

00:06:59.000 And always remember what should scare you about the media is what doesn't get exposed.

00:07:02.000 Note the headline on the post follow-up story.

00:07:04.000 It's sort of maliciously anodyne.

00:07:05.000 Recording reveals details of Trump call to Georgia's chief elections investigator.

00:07:10.000 It's not Trump's remarks grossly misrepresented across media because we credulously fall for political ops.

00:07:16.000 Mary Katherine Hamm of CNN.

00:07:18.000 She says that somebody should lose their job.

00:07:19.000 She said, so they made up quotes.

00:07:21.000 Wasn't the actual F. The header for the story could be a little clearer, like, our bad, we made fake news that led the national news for weeks, and this audio proves it.

00:07:28.000 For those in my timeline asking if it really matters because Trump is bad anyway, yes, it really matters.

00:07:33.000 Quotes being correct matters a lot.

00:07:35.000 Don't you see that's the issue?

00:07:36.000 If a reporter is so dead sure that, quote, Trump bad anyway, He's less inclined to question or vet his own stories.

00:07:42.000 And don't give me the corrections are an example of the system working stuff.

00:07:44.000 Sometimes they are.

00:07:45.000 Here, they're coming in three months later, when they are outed by a recording, and the correction and new story are designed to downplay as much as possible, not blare as loudly as the original.

00:07:55.000 Again, it's a pretty amazing thing.

00:07:57.000 So they directly misattributed quotes.

00:07:59.000 They didn't paraphrase, right?

00:08:00.000 They put it in quotation marks.

00:08:01.000 They said Trump said X. Trump never said X. They did it based on anonymous sourcing.

00:08:05.000 And then they laundered that into multiple media outlets.

00:08:08.000 And this was, by the way, this was quoted in the impeachment papers for Trump the second time around.

00:08:14.000 That report was quoted in the impeachment papers.

00:08:16.000 I think it was charge 10 in the impeachment papers.

00:08:19.000 Okay, that's pretty unbelievable.

00:08:20.000 So they laundered a false piece of news into an impeachment.

00:08:24.000 And then they wonder why we don't trust them.

00:08:25.000 Then they wonder why the credibility of the media is on edge.

00:08:28.000 It also demonstrates full scale that the fact-checking media are just garbage.

00:08:32.000 It shows that the fact-checking media are willing to cover for pretty much anything so long as it comes from one of their buddies.

00:08:37.000 Because the way that this works is that if you are a member of the establishment-approved media, you can say anything, and your fact-checking buddies will cover up for you.

00:08:44.000 But if you are a member of the non-establishment media, then they will come after you with a pickaxe for saying something that is true, but they disagree with.

00:08:53.000 It really is an impressive show here.

00:08:55.000 And the fact, again, that the Washington Post blew this story so badly, and the fact that the entire media are now rushing to the defense of the Washington Post, should tell you something.

00:09:05.000 It should tell you something.

00:09:07.000 So it is pretty amazing.

00:09:10.000 Again, the original Washington Post story did break, I believe on January 6th is when it originally broke.

00:09:18.000 Or, I'm sorry, the original news was broken before January 6th.

00:09:23.000 And January 5th is before the Georgia runoff, I believe.

00:09:26.000 So it may have had an impact on an incredibly tight Georgia runoff election.

00:09:30.000 That's not exactly a shocker.

00:09:31.000 But that's not actually true.

00:09:33.000 to the Washington Post fact checker.

00:09:34.000 He said, the Washington Post reporting on Trump's call to the Georgia Secretary of State, undisputed as the audio tape was obtained from the start, was the article cited in the impeachment article.

00:09:41.000 Trump naturally pretends otherwise, but that's not actually true.

00:09:45.000 Actually, they reveal, they actually refer to, I believe, both stories.

00:09:49.000 So, impressive showing by the media, but this is what our media are now.

00:09:54.000 CNN spends all day just covering Fox News.

00:09:57.000 That's all the media do.

00:09:59.000 The media cover people in conservative news, and they report false stories, and they monitor the false stories through multiple media outlets, and then they give themselves nice fact checks.

00:10:09.000 Very, very convenient stuff for our mainstream media who are doing an excellent job journalisming.

00:10:14.000 Because this is what they do.

00:10:16.000 And again, the false news always rockets around Earth faster than the real news.

00:10:19.000 You wonder why President Trump had a lot of ground to cover?

00:10:23.000 He had such fertile ground when he would talk about fake news.

00:10:26.000 The answer is because we in the conservative community have known for decades that the media do this kind of crap.

00:10:31.000 This goes well back before Bernard Goldberg put out the book Bias in the early 2000s.

00:10:35.000 I remember my parents canceling their subscription to the Los Angeles Times in the mid-90s over the Los Angeles Times running a picture of a supposedly Palestinian man supposedly being beaten by an Israeli soldier on their front page.

00:10:48.000 The caption was false.

00:10:48.000 It turned out that it was a man attempting to escape Palestinian rock throwers and an Israeli soldier shouting at the people trying to throw rocks at the guy.

00:10:56.000 The fake news has been a thing for quite a while, and all the mistakes are in one direction.

00:11:00.000 When is the last time they made a mistake in the direction of conservatives?

00:11:04.000 Can you name one?

00:11:06.000 I mean, literally one.

00:11:07.000 Can you name a mistake that has been made in the direction of Republicans?

00:11:11.000 The answer, of course, is no.

00:11:13.000 And these kind of stories happen regularly.

00:11:16.000 People lose their jobs over this kind of stuff.

00:11:18.000 I mean, we've talked on this program in the past several weeks about the media simply taking comments by particular people and then deliberately misinterpreting them to get them fired.

00:11:28.000 There's an entire Washington Post story that came on the heels of a Georgetown professor being fired for saying something not racist, and the entire angle of the story is that it was racist.

00:11:37.000 There are a couple of types of bias that the media can go through.

00:11:39.000 One is selection bias.

00:11:40.000 What they cover and what they don't.

00:11:41.000 They won't cover Andrew Cuomo being a corrupt toolbag until a couple of months after the election.

00:11:45.000 Then they'll start covering it.

00:11:45.000 So selection bias is one thing.

00:11:47.000 And then there is the way they cover stories, right?

00:11:49.000 The angle of the story.

00:11:50.000 That is another area of bias.

00:11:51.000 And then the third is the worst kind of bias.

00:11:53.000 And that is where they will just believe whatever confirms their priors.

00:11:57.000 And then they will just report that credulously out.

00:12:00.000 And then later, if they get it wrong, they'll walk it back.

00:12:03.000 Let's not pretend that these folks have any stake in the objective truth.

00:12:07.000 When I say these folks, I don't mean everybody in the media, but there are enough of them that it is indicative of a broader problem in the media they refuse to face up to.

00:12:15.000 It's pretty incredible.

00:12:17.000 Another perfect example of the media simply laundering a story into a non-story, or rather laundering a non-story into a story.

00:12:23.000 So Peter Pischke is a columnist for the Post-Millennial.

00:12:27.000 He has a piece today about a doctor who's basically been railroaded out of the American Medical Association.

00:12:33.000 Here is what he says.

00:12:34.000 Until last week, Dr. Edward Livingston was a celebrated academic, known for his compassion and for being a wise hand at difficult topics.

00:12:40.000 He was the deputy editor of JAMA, the AMA's scientific and scholarly arm and host of its successful JAMA Clinical Reviews podcast.

00:12:46.000 Now, he is persona non grata.

00:12:48.000 Does anyone care about the truth when a juicy narrative is afoot?

00:12:50.000 Will we burn everything down to get to the sin of racism even when none occurred?

00:12:54.000 If you Google Livingston's name, you'll find such damning headlines like, JAMA Posts Podcast on Structural Racism.

00:12:59.000 Here is the backlash.

00:13:00.000 JAMA apologized and deletes tweet that questioned racism in medicine.

00:13:03.000 Market watch.

00:13:04.000 No physician is racist.

00:13:05.000 Twitter calls foul on JAMA podcast.

00:13:07.000 Med page today and dozens more like it.

00:13:08.000 Facing such an impossibly overwhelming force, the panicking AMA fired Livingston, memory hold an episode of a podcast and announced a formal investigation.

00:13:19.000 As the finishing touch, AMA CEO Dr. James Madera declared what amounts to the AMA pledging itself to anti-racism as popularized by Ibram X. Kendi.

00:13:27.000 So what exactly happened here?

00:13:29.000 Well, Dr. Livingston is innocent of racism.

00:13:31.000 He himself is an adherent of what the New Left calls anti-racism.

00:13:34.000 I know because I did what the media wouldn't in my homework.

00:13:36.000 Whether it be out of laziness or purposeful manipulation, publications like Medscape Business Insider, Forbes, The Hill, and The Root all condemned Livingston.

00:13:43.000 Not a one bothered to even provide a copy or transcript of the offending audio.

00:13:47.000 Living Sins Detractors so-called proof is a singular bad podcast alert tweet and some uncontextualized lines of dialogue.

00:13:53.000 The declarative shout for racism is a tweet, the kind of which an intern might write or post as mangled copy from show notes, which was sent out by the JAMA Twitter handle.

00:14:00.000 It read, no physician is racist.

00:14:02.000 So how can there be structural racism in healthcare?

00:14:04.000 An explanation of the idea by doctors for doctors in this user-friendly podcast from the date, the great Dr. Katz, NYCHH and EHL JAMA.

00:14:12.000 The odds that a deputy editor of one of the most influential journals of medicine wrote his own podcast alert is an absurdity.

00:14:17.000 The other evidence against Livingston, quotes devoid of context from the podcast episode.

00:14:22.000 This episode featured public health expert, Dr. Mitch Cass, CEO of NYC Health Plus Hospitals, in what was the fourth part of a series dedicated to fighting racism in medicine, of which Livingston was a participant.

00:14:31.000 Here is the line shared by the media to justify indignation.

00:14:33.000 Quote, structural racism is an unfortunate term.

00:14:36.000 Personally, I think taking racism out of the conversation will help.

00:14:39.000 Many of us are offended by the concept that we are racist.

00:14:42.000 You don't need a degree from a J-school to see that the media are cherry-picking this comment.

00:14:46.000 According to anti-racists, structural racism is what happens when parts of society get ordered in such a way that it disproportionately hurts minorities or folks like me, the disabled.

00:14:54.000 The media wants you to believe that Dr. Livingston, a Jewish descendant of immigrants, is a closeted structural racism denier.

00:14:59.000 That is just not true.

00:15:01.000 Here is the full context of the closing remarks.

00:15:04.000 Quote, Structural racism is an unfortunate term to describe a very real problem.

00:15:09.000 There are structural problems in our society.

00:15:11.000 There are neighborhoods that are impoverished.

00:15:12.000 The quality of life is poor in those areas because we may put factories in them or have major thoroughfares that travel through them, but we strive to have a society that's more equal, etc., etc., etc.

00:15:21.000 Okay, so, this doctor never denied that there is structural racism.

00:15:25.000 By the way, the notion of structural racism is widely open to interpretation.

00:15:30.000 The basic idea that if there is some sort of Inequality of outcome, that this means the system is itself racist, is a logical absurdity.

00:15:38.000 It's not real.

00:15:38.000 But that's not even what this doctor is saying.

00:15:40.000 This doctor is a left-wing adherent.

00:15:42.000 He's an anti-racist.

00:15:43.000 It didn't matter.

00:15:44.000 He lost his job with JAMA anyway.

00:15:47.000 Because again, the lie matters more than the truth.

00:15:49.000 So long as there is somebody to get today, so long as there is somebody you can take out of context today, the media will just do it.

00:15:54.000 All the way from a random doctor to the President of the United States.

00:15:57.000 Because they are all in the tank.

00:16:00.000 These networks are in the tank.

00:16:01.000 These newspapers are in the tank.

00:16:03.000 You cannot trust them.

00:16:04.000 And then, because you can't trust them, Their next move is to shut down any other place you can get news, which is why you have columnists for the Washington Post clubbing social media saying they shouldn't allow places like my place, Daily Wire, to have any traffic.

00:16:14.000 It's why you have people in the mainstream media going after Substack so individual journalists can't actually write what they want to write.

00:16:19.000 They must maintain the monopoly on their faux version of the truth.

00:16:23.000 Okay, in just a second, we'll get to more on their faux version of the truth, because the bias is so eminently obvious.

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00:17:21.000 Okay, so when I say that the media have a bias, I mean that their bias is extraordinary.

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00:17:34.000 Okay, so when I say that the media have a bias, I mean that their bias is extraordinary.

00:17:39.000 Joe Biden, president of Houseplant, he's just there to hide the water stain.

00:17:43.000 The water stain is the radical policy.

00:17:45.000 President House plans is there to provide a moderate face, to be barely alive and never talk to the media and avoid all questions, and for the media to cheer this.

00:17:52.000 Because remember, the Trump administration was dishonest and obstructionist.

00:17:56.000 They didn't provide the media with the information they needed.

00:17:58.000 The Biden administration doesn't do press conferences and lives regularly, but the media cheer them on.

00:18:03.000 Are you noticing why?

00:18:04.000 Might it have something to do with the fact that the media love Joe Biden's policies and they're big fans?

00:18:09.000 Thus, you have this tweet from Politico.

00:18:12.000 Honestly, like, this is a North Korean-style tweet.

00:18:16.000 Wow, gaffe-free, guys.

00:18:17.000 Did you know that Joe Biden's been gaffe-free?

00:18:18.000 Weird, because every time he talks, I play a gaffe if he's on the show.

00:18:20.000 Every single time.

00:18:21.000 with a largely gaffe-free White House debut after a lifetime of verbal stumbles.

00:18:25.000 Wow, gaffe-free, guys.

00:18:26.000 Did you know that Joe Biden's been gaffe-free?

00:18:28.000 Weird, because every time he talks, I play a gaffe with his on the show.

00:18:31.000 Every single time, without fail.

00:18:32.000 The President of the United States cannot get through three sentences without stumbling.

00:18:37.000 He cannot.

00:18:38.000 It is a physical impossibility for him at this point.

00:18:40.000 He is in a state of decline.

00:18:41.000 It is sad to say, and frankly, it's bad for him, it's bad for the country.

00:18:44.000 I wish it weren't true.

00:18:45.000 I wish he were fully himself and fully healthy.

00:18:48.000 But he clearly is not.

00:18:50.000 But the media are just going to pretend that he is gaffe-free.

00:18:53.000 So not only is he gaffe-free and stumble-free, they're like, wow, I mean, it's been an incredible, you know why?

00:18:58.000 Because they are hiding him in the basement, gang.

00:19:01.000 He hasn't done a press conference.

00:19:02.000 He hasn't answered an unfriendly question since January 20th.

00:19:06.000 By my calendar, it is now March 16th.

00:19:09.000 So it has been almost two full months since he took office, and he has not taken an unfriendly question yet.

00:19:15.000 Instead, he takes questions like, what flavor of ice cream do you like?

00:19:18.000 And how are those White House dogs doing?

00:19:21.000 It's unbelievable.

00:19:22.000 And the media are treating this as though he's just good at this.

00:19:25.000 He's not good at this.

00:19:26.000 You guys are just bad at this.

00:19:28.000 It's not that Joe Biden is good at his job.

00:19:29.000 It's that you guys are crap at your job.

00:19:32.000 According to Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, he says, wake me when more than one person asks questions at a time and when Joe Biden isn't acting as Joe's wingman.

00:19:39.000 Okay, my prediction, this will not age well, It shouldn't even age at all, at least not among the White House press corps, who might be wondering when Biden's absence from the briefing room will finally get some notice from their colleagues in the media.

00:19:49.000 There's been a curious lack of pressure from media outlets over access to Biden, even more so from media outlets that adopted slogans like, democracy dies in darkness, during the previous administration.

00:19:59.000 What exactly does largely gaffe-free mean?

00:20:03.000 Is that anything like praising a spouse for being frequently faithful?

00:20:06.000 Largely gaffe-free.

00:20:09.000 Politico's actual write-up apparently is a little bit better than the tweet, but not by much.

00:20:13.000 They say, Joe Biden disciplined messenger?

00:20:15.000 Disciplined messenger?

00:20:18.000 Okay, he just loses the thread in the middle of questions.

00:20:21.000 He says things that make no sense.

00:20:22.000 They literally shut down White House feeds so he doesn't answer questions.

00:20:26.000 But he's gaffe-free, guys.

00:20:28.000 Not only that, you have full articles from the Washington Post, your source for establishment news.

00:20:34.000 A full article in the Washington Post defending Joe Biden for not doing press conferences.

00:20:38.000 The title, quote, Biden is due for a news conference, but they can be risky.

00:20:42.000 Oh, can they?

00:20:43.000 Tell me more, media specialist.

00:20:46.000 They can be risky, guys.

00:20:47.000 Who knew?

00:20:48.000 You know what the solution to that is?

00:20:50.000 Never have a press conference.

00:20:51.000 But if you're a Republican and you never have a press conference, you're super bad.

00:20:54.000 But if you're Joe Biden, you know, it's understandable because press conferences can be risky.

00:20:58.000 President Biden will hold his first formal news conference before April Fool's Day, the White House says.

00:21:02.000 Even if he held one today, it would be the latest any new commander-in-chief has faced a formal Q&A session with the press corps in a century.

00:21:09.000 His aides know the delay doesn't resonate much outside the Beltway.

00:21:11.000 On Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain retweeted a former Hillary Clinton adviser's mocking point that not doing a press conference won't cost Biden.

00:21:18.000 For 20 years, presidential aides have been telling me that news conferences are high risk and low reward.

00:21:23.000 A setting in which reporters largely set the agenda, questions can come out of left field, and one revealing comment or misstep from the president can define the exchange.

00:21:31.000 But that's just it.

00:21:31.000 You know, he probably should, but like the first, the entire article is about how it makes perfect sense why Joe Biden is not doing press conferences.

00:21:39.000 Yes, we know, because then he doesn't have to ask her questions about his garbage policy.

00:21:44.000 We understand.

00:21:44.000 And by the way, the policy is in fact garbage.

00:21:47.000 So instead, Joe Biden is just doing what Joe Biden does.

00:21:49.000 He just goes directly to the cameras.

00:21:52.000 Okay, so Joe Biden is now going to be taking a victory lap on COVID relief.

00:21:55.000 He is not going to be running around taking questions from the press.

00:21:58.000 He's not going to do any sort of interview in which difficult questions are asked.

00:22:02.000 He'll get softballs from George Stephanopoulos.

00:22:04.000 He's now scheduled to sit down with George Stephanopoulos, which is essentially like scheduling a lie down with your masseuse.

00:22:09.000 George Stephanopoulos, former Hillary Clinton aide.

00:22:13.000 It will never cease to be a source of amazement to me that George Stephanopoulos is somehow considered an objective source of news when he was the chief of staff for Hillary and Bill Clinton.

00:22:22.000 It's unbelievable to me.

00:22:24.000 It's the equivalent of, what if we just made Karl Rove a news anchor?

00:22:27.000 Seriously, what if we just made Jared Kushner a news anchor?

00:22:29.000 Like, what in the world are you talking about?

00:22:31.000 Are you insane?

00:22:33.000 But George Stephanopoulos over ABC News.

00:22:35.000 Like, what in the world?

00:22:37.000 But he's gonna sit down with Joe Biden.

00:22:39.000 It'll probably be super hard-hitting.

00:22:40.000 I mean, I assume that the questions will be along the lines of, so Joe, how are the dogs doing?

00:22:44.000 And also, Joe, just how much help are Americans going to get from you?

00:22:48.000 It'll be stuff like that.

00:22:50.000 Joe Biden, meanwhile, taking a very, very slow victory lap on COVID relief, pretending that all of this spending was necessary.

00:22:55.000 It absolutely was not.

00:22:57.000 And again, the democratic economic program, all the things that people tend to think of as the bugs are the features.

00:23:03.000 They want to blow out the spending.

00:23:05.000 They want to devalue the currency.

00:23:07.000 They want to raise taxes.

00:23:08.000 These are all part and parcel of a broader plan to claim that capitalism is failing because the more you intervene with capitalism, the more capitalism has a tough time.

00:23:15.000 And then when things fail, you can get more government interventionism.

00:23:18.000 When you blow out the currency the way they are doing right now, when you blow out the spending, this is not going to alleviate income inequality.

00:23:23.000 It's going to exacerbate income inequality because the income inequality can only be changed by people at the bottom getting richer.

00:23:30.000 That only happens when they get better jobs over the course of time, not by simply signing people checks.

00:23:34.000 The way that Joe Biden apparently thinks poverty is cured is with helicopter cash.

00:23:38.000 This has never been true any time in human history.

00:23:40.000 But here's Joe Biden taking a very slow victory lap with a couple of metamucil breaks.

00:23:46.000 Over the next 10 days, we'll reach two goals, two giant goals.

00:23:51.000 The first is 100 million shots in people's arms will have been completed within the next 10 days.

00:23:57.000 And 100 million checks in people's pockets in the next 100 days.

00:24:03.000 Shots in arms and money in pockets.

00:24:05.000 That's important.

00:24:06.000 The American Rescue Plan is already doing what it was designed to do, make a difference in people's everyday lives.

00:24:14.000 We're just getting started.

00:24:16.000 You're just getting started?

00:24:17.000 You just blew it out for $2 trillion.

00:24:18.000 Only $800 billion of which was even designed to go directly to Americans.

00:24:23.000 And the vast majority of those Americans still have jobs and are earning incomes and still have savings from the last go-around.

00:24:29.000 Again, the unemployment rate in the United States right now is about 6%.

00:24:31.000 It is not 20%.

00:24:33.000 It is not 30%.

00:24:33.000 It is not 40%.

00:24:33.000 It is not 20%. It is not 30%. It is not 40%.

00:24:36.000 In states that are open, the unemployment rate is 3%.

00:24:40.000 Now, Joe Biden is living off the benefit of the fact that there's going to be a natural economic recovery here simply as people go back to work.

00:24:45.000 This is the most artificial economic depression in the history of the American state.

00:24:51.000 Not close.

00:24:52.000 I mean, we were going great guns.

00:24:54.000 We had an unemployment rate that was down to about 3%, which is effectively full employment.

00:24:58.000 And the wages were rising.

00:24:59.000 We had more open jobs than people seeking the jobs.

00:25:01.000 So the wages were rising.

00:25:03.000 And then COVID hit, and it artificially tanked the economy because all the governments forced everybody to stay out of their jobs.

00:25:09.000 So that means that when everybody goes back to their job, there will be a vast recovery.

00:25:13.000 I mean, Joe Biden is one lucky son of a gun.

00:25:15.000 Because number one, he can be not alive and receive the plaudits of the media.

00:25:18.000 Number two, the economy is going to go grey guns simply by dint of the fact that it was before, then there was an artificial drop, and now the artificial drop is ending.

00:25:26.000 This is why Goldman Sachs predicts that the economy is going to be growing at 8% for 2021.

00:25:33.000 Axios says if Goldman's forecast is correct, it would mark the largest economic expansion for the U.S.

00:25:37.000 in generations.

00:25:38.000 Not only would 8% annual growth denote a stupendous turnaround from the coronavirus pandemic, it would significantly outpace the firm's growth expectations for the U.S.

00:25:46.000 as recently as late 2020.

00:25:49.000 According to Goldman, we have raised our GDP forecast to reflect the latest fiscal policy news and now expect 8% growth in 2021 and an unemployment rate of 4% at the end of 2021, the lowest among consensus forecasts, that falls to 3.5% in 2022 and 3.2% in 2023.

00:26:00.000 But!

00:26:05.000 We expect inflation dynamics to mirror those last cycle and therefore expect this forecast to translate to only 2.1% core PCE inflation in 2023.

00:26:12.000 Okay, well, what they are saying is that inflation is not going to spike over the course of the next couple of years because the economy is going to be superheated.

00:26:20.000 But what happens by 2024?

00:26:22.000 At a certain point, you have to pay for this stuff.

00:26:24.000 And this is what Joe Biden knows.

00:26:25.000 So what is his plan to pay for this stuff?

00:26:27.000 To avoid inflation.

00:26:28.000 As inflation starts to rise, what you're going to see Joe Biden push for is higher taxation.

00:26:32.000 That is the other end.

00:26:33.000 So Joe Biden gets exactly what he wants.

00:26:35.000 He's a high-tax, high-spend.

00:26:36.000 This is what he wants.

00:26:37.000 The taxation is a feature, not a bug.

00:26:39.000 Remember, the Democratic Party wants to tax you.

00:26:41.000 It is not that they tax you because they need the money to do good things.

00:26:45.000 They want to tax you.

00:26:47.000 I'll never forget in 2008, Barack Obama being asked on a Democratic primary stage whether he would raise the capital gains tax even if it resulted in less tax revenue for the government.

00:26:57.000 Because one of the things about tax revenue is that a growing economy produces more tax revenue and a shrinking economy produces less tax revenue.

00:27:05.000 So if tax policy creates a shrinking economy, would you still want higher taxes on capital gains?

00:27:10.000 And Barack Obama's answer was, yes, for purposes of fairness.

00:27:14.000 Democrats want higher taxes because they think that the government is good and you are stupid.

00:27:18.000 They think that the government should sign you checks and you should stay home.

00:27:21.000 They think that you can't make decisions about your own life, whether it is mask wearing or economic spending.

00:27:25.000 Raising taxes is something they want.

00:27:28.000 And by the way, if you believe that their taxes are going to stop at $400,000, that if you make over $400,000 a year, they'll raise taxes, but if you make below, they won't, that's a lie.

00:27:36.000 They're gonna raise taxes in a variety of areas that hit people in the middle of the income spectrum because the kind of spending they are doing right now requires it.

00:27:42.000 There is no way around it.

00:27:44.000 You cannot have European styles of living without European style taxation.

00:27:49.000 And the highest tax brackets in places like Scandinavia kick in when you're making about $60,000 or $65,000 a year, not when you're making $400,000 a year.

00:27:57.000 Plus, you're going to now experience what we call bracket creep.

00:27:59.000 So it is easy to say that if you make over $400,000 a year, then you're going to get increased taxation.

00:28:06.000 But what happens as inflation starts to kick in?

00:28:08.000 What happens as people start to inflate the value or deflate the value of the U.S.

00:28:13.000 dollar and what bought you a bagel yesterday is half the money that it would cost you to buy a bagel today?

00:28:21.000 What happens when your wage rises simply to compensate for the rising prices of goods and services?

00:28:27.000 What happens then?

00:28:28.000 What happens when $400,000 today is actually the equivalent of $200,000 five years ago?

00:28:33.000 You get bracket creep.

00:28:34.000 In other words, you don't even have to change the absolute number.

00:28:37.000 All you have to do is wait for inflation to catch up and push people into quote-unquote higher income brackets even though they can't buy more for their money.

00:28:44.000 So what is Joe Biden planning?

00:28:45.000 He's planning a massive tax expansion.

00:28:47.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

00:28:49.000 First, let us talk about your sleep quality.

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00:30:06.000 Alrighty, so.

00:30:07.000 We'll get to Biden's tax plans in just one second.

00:30:09.000 First, we've been talking about it for a week now.

00:30:11.000 This is where it gets really awesome.

00:30:13.000 This Friday, March 19th, the premiere of Candace.

00:30:16.000 That's Daily Wire's new talk show hosted by conservative lightning rod Candace Owens.

00:30:19.000 It's no secret that Candace has ruffled some feathers along the course of her career.

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00:30:50.000 You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.

00:30:53.000 Alrighty, so.

00:31:00.000 Joe Biden is now pushing massive tax hikes.

00:31:02.000 According to Bloomberg, Joe Biden is planning the first major federal tax hike since 1993 to help pay for the long-term economic program designed as a follow-up to his pandemic relief bill.

00:31:10.000 So that was fun, right?

00:31:11.000 He gave you free money, except it ain't free.

00:31:12.000 Because there ain't no such thing as free money.

00:31:14.000 At a certain point, that money has to come from somewhere.

00:31:16.000 There are only three places that you can get money when you spend money like this.

00:31:19.000 One, in the bond market.

00:31:20.000 You sell bonds, you take that money, and you hand that to Americans.

00:31:23.000 There's only one problem with that.

00:31:24.000 The bond market is going to go under if you keep doing this over and over and you blow out the debt so that nobody thinks they're going to get paid back with a dollar that is of the same value as the dollar they are paying you today for the bond.

00:31:33.000 That is the second step.

00:31:39.000 None of these three things are good, which is why you should really consider before you decide to spend trillions of dollars that do not exist.

00:31:46.000 Well, here's the thing.

00:31:46.000 Again, Joe Biden wants the taxes.

00:31:48.000 Democrats love the taxes.

00:31:49.000 The taxes are their friend.

00:31:50.000 Because they get to then claim that they are punishing the rich.

00:31:53.000 This is a class warfare point.

00:31:55.000 It is not about the efficiency and efficacy of America's economy.

00:31:58.000 This is an economy that is producing, without tax hikes, a 3% unemployment rate.

00:32:03.000 And your solution is to take all those job creators and tax the living crap out of them?

00:32:09.000 What do you think they're gonna do?

00:32:10.000 If you tax economic activity, why would I, at a certain point, I'm going to either move to avoid taxes, right?

00:32:17.000 I just, I'm not gonna pretend I didn't do that with California.

00:32:19.000 I personally took my family and left California in large measure because of their extraordinary income tax rates.

00:32:26.000 I didn't feel like paying on top an additional 13 to 15% of my income to the garbage state of California.

00:32:31.000 I didn't feel like doing that.

00:32:33.000 So people will find ways to not do that.

00:32:36.000 Okay, and if you raise the capital gains tax, you know what?

00:32:39.000 People will just take that money and they will put it into savings.

00:32:42.000 They just will not spend.

00:32:43.000 They will take that money off the market and they will put it on the sidelines.

00:32:46.000 Trillions of dollars sat on the sidelines during the Obama administration for precisely this purpose.

00:32:50.000 The minute that Donald Trump took office, a lot of that money came off the sidelines, which is one of the reasons why you saw this economic boon.

00:32:56.000 Okay, right now, Joe Biden is living off the fact that there is, again, this artificial economic expansion that comes in the wake of an extraordinary artificial economic depression.

00:33:05.000 So he doesn't actually have to feel the impact of his own bad economic policy, and he's counting on that.

00:33:09.000 He's counting on you not noticing, because again, if the economic growth rates are 7% as opposed to 8%, that's a pretty big difference, actually.

00:33:17.000 But you're not gonna feel it, because the expansion is so great.

00:33:20.000 So it's all fun and games, as long as it lasts.

00:33:22.000 But then, it doesn't last, and then there are consequences to this kind of crap.

00:33:27.000 For the Biden administration, the planned changes are an opportunity not just to fund key initiatives like infrastructure, climate, and expanded help for poorer Americans, but also to address what Democrats argue are inequities in the tax system itself.

00:33:37.000 By the way, again, whenever you hear people say that people at the top aren't paying their fair share, what would be the fair share?

00:33:42.000 The top 1% of income earners in the United States pay something like 30% of all tax revenue through income tax to the federal government.

00:33:48.000 The top 50% pay 100%.

00:33:49.000 The top 10% pay something like 80% of all taxes in the United States.

00:33:55.000 So, no, you're right, it's not fair.

00:33:58.000 It's not fair because you know what would actually be fair?

00:33:59.000 A flat tax rate.

00:34:00.000 I speak as someone who has paid taxes in nearly every income bracket in American life.

00:34:06.000 And I've earned a very middle class income before and paid the tax bracket.

00:34:11.000 And I've paid the top tax bracket as well.

00:34:13.000 And let me tell you, I'm paying a lot more in tax by percentage now than I ever was making $60,000 a year.

00:34:21.000 It is amazing to me that people continue to maintain the absolute fiction that people at the top are not paying their way.

00:34:26.000 It's just not true.

00:34:28.000 All net taxes in the United States are paid by the wealthy.

00:34:30.000 All.

00:34:31.000 Not some, all.

00:34:32.000 They are paid by the wealthy.

00:34:34.000 Net taxes are the taxes that you pay minus the government benefits that you receive.

00:34:39.000 Because if you're at the top of the income spectrum, you receive no government benefits.

00:34:44.000 According to Sarah Bianchi, head of the U.S.

00:34:45.000 Public Policy at Evercore ISI, his whole outlook has always been that Americans believe tax policy needs to be fair.

00:34:51.000 Fair.

00:34:51.000 See, this is the beautiful thing about the mush forward fair.

00:34:54.000 Fair just means whatever Joe Biden says it means today.

00:34:56.000 That's what fair means.

00:34:57.000 It's not about efficiency.

00:34:58.000 It doesn't have a measurable outcome.

00:35:00.000 It's just about fair.

00:35:02.000 So all of this is not really about helping the economy so much as it is it about the ruse of using the government to cram down a version of fairness on the American public that comes straight from Joe Biden's adult brain.

00:35:13.000 Wonderful.

00:35:14.000 Meanwhile, it is amazing.

00:35:15.000 People want the government to control your life.

00:35:17.000 Have you seen the government lately?

00:35:19.000 When you see Kamala Harris up at the podium saying, we're from the government, we're here to help, when was the last time the government did a great job with something, like a fantastic job?

00:35:26.000 The reality is that even the vaccine programs, those vaccines were developed by private industry.

00:35:32.000 They're being largely distributed by private industry in places like Publix or CVS.

00:35:36.000 They're being distributed in doctor's offices.

00:35:39.000 If they are being distributed by an efficient government, that's only because of state governments.

00:35:42.000 When's the last time the federal government did something you thought, wow, that was efficient?

00:35:46.000 That was amazing.

00:35:46.000 I'm so glad they did that.

00:35:47.000 And I don't mean just making up money and giving it to you.

00:35:51.000 That's not an actual task.

00:35:53.000 That's not something that they actually administer well.

00:35:56.000 Speaking of things they don't administer well, Joe Biden continues to ignore the growing threat on the border.

00:36:03.000 According to the Washington Post, Biden faces growing political threat from border up people.

00:36:06.000 Again, every headline from the Washington Post is, how is it hurting Joe's feelings?

00:36:10.000 How is the news hurting addled Joe's feelings today?

00:36:13.000 Sean Sullivan and Nick Miroff writing, Representative McCarthy, he says this is worse than a crisis.

00:36:17.000 Texas Democrat whose district hugs the border with Mexico isn't happy with how President Biden's team has responded to the surge of migrants trying to enter the United States.

00:36:24.000 His people need to do a better job of listening to those of us who have done this before, he said Monday.

00:36:28.000 Representative McCarthy, he says this is worse than a crisis.

00:36:31.000 Here's Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader.

00:36:35.000 It's worse than a crisis.

00:36:36.000 I thought I would see a crisis, but this is really a human heartbreak.

00:36:39.000 We have a brand new facility to care for these children.

00:36:42.000 They built it beyond capacity, thinking they would never reach it.

00:36:45.000 Today, they just set the anniversary that they broke capacity.

00:36:49.000 More than 1,040 children, and it's only growing every day.

00:36:52.000 How many children didn't make it?

00:36:55.000 How much is human trafficking being increased by what's happening?

00:36:59.000 And it all started with these presidential policies.

00:37:02.000 Okay, he happens to be correct about this.

00:37:04.000 According to the Washington Post, Biden is now facing fire from a variety of places on the political spectrum.

00:37:08.000 Centrist Democrats are afraid that his border policy is going to turn the 2022 election against them.

00:37:13.000 Liberals and immigration activists are upset because of how migrants are being treated because they just want people let into the country willy-nilly.

00:37:19.000 Republicans, of course, are pouncing.

00:37:20.000 Lots of pouncing.

00:37:22.000 The Washington Post is deeply worried about the political impact on Joe Biden of all of this.

00:37:28.000 They say it's not clear that voters are going to see it how Biden sees it.

00:37:31.000 Trump demonstrated that immigration can be an explosive issue that upends the political landscape, suggesting it could be a real threat to a president who is otherwise coasting on high approval ratings.

00:37:39.000 And the dilemma is greater because so many crossing the border are minors.

00:37:43.000 The president is receiving high marks from most Americans for his efforts to curtail COVID, including a sweeping $1.9 trillion relief bill.

00:37:50.000 That has left Republicans scrambling to find a potent issue as they seek to retake the House and Senate in 2022.

00:37:55.000 Many Republicans believe immigration may be that topic.

00:37:57.000 Ah, it's the Republican pouncing that's the problem, not the thousands of kids being held in cages.

00:38:01.000 By the way, immigrant teens are now going to be held at the Dallas Convention Center.

00:38:04.000 This is how bad things have gotten at the border.

00:38:06.000 The U.S.

00:38:07.000 government plans to house up to 3,000 immigrant teenagers at a convention center in downtown Dallas as it struggles to find space for the surge of migrant children at the border who have strained the immigration system just two months into Joe Biden's presidency.

00:38:19.000 American authorities encountered people crossing the border without legal status more than 100,000 times in February.

00:38:26.000 That is a level higher than all but four months of Donald Trump's presidency This, of course, is a challenge for President Joe Biden and his credibility.

00:38:34.000 Which, of course, is the big thing.

00:38:35.000 We have to worry about Biden.

00:38:36.000 We shouldn't worry about the policy, just worry about Biden these days.

00:38:39.000 Speaking of which, if you think that this White House is not radical enough, they're now at war with the Popes.

00:38:44.000 That's exciting stuff.

00:38:45.000 So the White House has announced that they are at odds with the Catholic Church.

00:38:48.000 It is always a source of great bemusement and amusement to me when the media find out that the Catholic Church believes Catholic things.

00:38:55.000 This is one of my favorites.

00:38:56.000 So, every so often, the media will have a headline.

00:38:59.000 And the headline will be something like, Catholic Church still against same-sex marriage.

00:39:04.000 Right, like they have been for, you know, 2,000 years since, like, the Gospels?

00:39:09.000 I mean, shocking.

00:39:10.000 Now, here's the thing.

00:39:11.000 It actually is shocking because so many religious institutions have just caved and decided they don't give a damn about anything the Bible says anymore.

00:39:17.000 That basically all church is supposed to be is some warmed-over pizza, a guy playing the guitar, and some vague chant about spirituality and finding your bliss.

00:39:26.000 Basically, churches have turned into 1960s yoga sessions.

00:39:30.000 But it turns out that the Catholic Church, one of the historic institutions of Western civilization, it still has a doctrine.

00:39:36.000 That doctrine actually exists on abortion and same-sex marriage.

00:39:40.000 And I understand that they're surprised because they think that Pope Francis, after having knocked over the Catholic Church's position on capitalism under Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church's position on Economics and individual freedom under Benedict.

00:39:54.000 They've decided basically to embrace liberation theology under Pope Francis, who is a very, very left-wing pope.

00:40:00.000 I know that they're still shocked to learn that Pope Francis, you know, still being Catholic, actually doesn't believe in abortion on demand and thinks it's a grave crime, and also doesn't believe in same-sex marriage.

00:40:08.000 But it is still a source of amusement to me that the entire media is going to be shocked by this.

00:40:13.000 And they are.

00:40:13.000 They're shocked.

00:40:14.000 Now, here's the reality.

00:40:15.000 They're not shocked.

00:40:16.000 Their goal is to make institutions like the Catholic Church defunct.

00:40:19.000 That has been their goal for quite a while.

00:40:20.000 Either hijack an institution or destroy it.

00:40:22.000 This is the way that the modern American left and the international left works.

00:40:26.000 All institutions must either be hijacked or destroyed.

00:40:29.000 If you can't destroy the military, you hijack the military by turning it woke and then having members of the military march to Marjorie Taylor Greene's office because she said that Guam was a foreign country, idiotically.

00:40:40.000 So people went to her office from the military to show that Guam is actually a U.S.

00:40:44.000 territory.

00:40:45.000 Like, I have no idea why that is necessary or relevant.

00:40:48.000 You know, you might want to face up to China at some point, guys.

00:40:52.000 But every institution must be turned.

00:40:53.000 And so the Catholic Church must be turned or destroyed.

00:40:56.000 This, by the way, is one of the reasons why the media went so hard after the Catholic Church in the wake of what was a monstrous and egregious pedophilia scandal inside the Catholic Church.

00:41:06.000 Two things can be true at once.

00:41:07.000 One, that was a monstrous cover-up by the Catholic Church for which the repercussions still have not been fully paid.

00:41:12.000 And two, The kind of child abuse that you saw in the Catholic Church has been happening in American public schools for generations, and nobody talks about it because, frankly, the left loves the public schools.

00:41:22.000 So two things can be true at once, right?

00:41:23.000 You never hear about the scandal of kids being abused in public schools because you're not allowed to talk about that.

00:41:29.000 But they will focus all their ire on the Catholic Church.

00:41:31.000 Again, the differential treatment is the critique, not that people should get off scot-free for the mistreatment of children, God forbid.

00:41:38.000 Okay, but the point here is that for the media, the Catholic Church is an enemy.

00:41:41.000 And to pretend it's anything but is ridiculous.

00:41:43.000 They will occasionally say nice things about Pope Francis when Pope Francis mirrors their garbage about climate change and how we need a redistributionist global economic policy.

00:41:50.000 But the minute that Pope Francis actually cites things that have, you know, something to do with Catholic doctrine, as opposed to fringe stuff that the Bible really doesn't talk about, then they get all uptight.

00:42:00.000 So, the White House has now announced that Joe Biden is at odds with the Pope on same-sex unions because the Pope came out and said that the Catholic Church cannot bless same-sex unions.

00:42:09.000 Again, a position that has not changed for several thousand years, does not arise from animus, arises from natural law theology.

00:42:16.000 Natural law theology, which has been a major part of church thought since Thomas Aquinas, and really there are proto-roots of natural law theology even before that, The basic idea of natural law theology is that God created the universe in a certain way.

00:42:29.000 That certain way gives us clues as to what human behavior should look like.

00:42:33.000 And the Catholic Church's stance on same-sex marriage has been that Nature created two sexes.

00:42:40.000 Those sexes were made to procreate and thus human sexual relations should be based on that assumption.

00:42:45.000 Which obviously leads to male-female reproduction and male-female sexual relations within the context of marriage.

00:42:51.000 This has been a long-standing church position.

00:42:52.000 There's nothing immoral or amoral about it.

00:42:54.000 It is a natural opposition.

00:42:56.000 Well, now the White House is coming out and saying that the White House disagrees with the church's stance.

00:43:01.000 Despite the fact that Joe Biden considers himself a devout Catholic, he disagrees with the Pope on this.

00:43:05.000 Well, let me just tell you something.

00:43:06.000 Joe Biden is not a devout Catholic, if by devout Catholic you mean he agrees with church doctrine, which is usually the way that you define people being devout in a particular faith, is that they agree with the core doctrines.

00:43:16.000 If you say, I'm a devout Jew, but also I don't agree with the Sabbath, You're not a devout Jew.

00:43:20.000 You're just not.

00:43:21.000 You can identify as Jewish thinking, you can be of Jewish ethnicity, but you're not a devout Jew if you just reject the Sabbath outright.

00:43:28.000 And it's hard to be a devout Catholic if you just reject church doctrine on core issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.

00:43:35.000 But, again, this is all part and parcel of a broader leftist attack on institutions.

00:43:38.000 So, speaking of those broader leftist attacks on institutions, Don Lemon of CNN is very angry at the Vatican today.

00:43:46.000 So, number one, I don't I think that Don Lemon is a great source on Catholicism.

00:43:51.000 Like, if you are looking for your source on Catholicism, I typically would not go to the guy who was essentially doing wolf calls at waiters, according to, I think it was a New York Magazine profile of Don Lemon.

00:44:01.000 He was wolf calling and assessing the sexual attributes of male waiters during an actual sit-down interview.

00:44:09.000 This was considered charming at the time, right?

00:44:11.000 That's the way this works.

00:44:13.000 Don Lemon, though, has some thoughts on Catholicism in the Vatican.

00:44:17.000 Why do—why is—why?

00:44:20.000 Just why?

00:44:22.000 And the answer is because, of course, he's left-wing.

00:44:24.000 And the left will not rest until the Catholic Church is wiped out of existence.

00:44:27.000 Or hijacked.

00:44:28.000 For liberation, theology, and they get rid of their social policy.

00:44:30.000 Everything must mirror the left.

00:44:31.000 The left cannot stand that anyone thinks differently than they do.

00:44:34.000 Here is Don Lemon.

00:44:36.000 Listen, I respect people's right to believe in whatever they want to believe in their God.

00:44:39.000 No, you don't.

00:44:40.000 But if you believe in something that hurts another person or that does not give someone the same rights or freedoms, not necessarily under the Constitution because this is under God, I think that that's wrong.

00:44:52.000 And I think that the Catholic Church and many other churches really need to re-examine themselves and their teachings because that is not what God is about.

00:45:01.000 God is not about hindering people or even judging people.

00:45:05.000 God is not about judging people?

00:45:07.000 That's a new one!

00:45:09.000 I'm not going to take lessons on God from Don Lemon.

00:45:13.000 First of all, anybody who tells you that God is not about judging people is an abject moron.

00:45:16.000 That is literally one of God's rules.

00:45:18.000 That is like the chief rule when it comes to humankind, is judging people.

00:45:23.000 Read a Bible.

00:45:25.000 The notion that God doesn't judge people?

00:45:27.000 Then what is the purpose of Him?

00:45:29.000 Just say that you're an atheist.

00:45:31.000 Just say that you don't believe in a God that actually cares about humanity.

00:45:35.000 If God cares about humanity, then God judges humanity.

00:45:38.000 This has been a long-standing part of religion.

00:45:41.000 Every major religion.

00:45:42.000 Every single one that believes in a monotheistic God believes that God judges people.

00:45:46.000 But again, only the religion of leftism says that we're not judgmental except that you're immoral.

00:45:51.000 I mean, the number of self-contradictory statements there from Don Lemon is truly incredible.

00:45:55.000 He says, I respect anybody's right to believe what they want religiously, except if they believe you know things I disagree with, like God judges people and has standards for human behavior.

00:46:02.000 If they believe that, then they're bad people and immoral, and they need to rethink their teachings.

00:46:07.000 Listen, I don't think that Don Lemon needs to rethink his beliefs about homosexual activity.

00:46:11.000 It's a free country.

00:46:12.000 He can think whatever he wants.

00:46:14.000 In fact, it's a free country.

00:46:15.000 And as long as he's not harming anybody else, he can act however he wants.

00:46:19.000 But guess what?

00:46:19.000 He doesn't get to dictate to me how I lead my life or how I teach my kids or what I believe.

00:46:23.000 I thought that was the basic line, that was the basic agreement, was it not?

00:46:27.000 But no, that is not the agreement, because when self-expression becomes key, institutions must die.

00:46:32.000 When self-expression and self-identity become key, institutions must die.

00:46:35.000 We have now entered the expressive individualism phase of American life, where all of society is supposed to comply with your view of yourself.

00:46:44.000 And if I refuse to comply with that view, I have done you a harm.

00:46:47.000 Now, I've never done Don Lemon a harm.

00:46:49.000 I haven't.

00:46:50.000 I haven't told him what he cannot and can and cannot do by law.

00:46:53.000 I have not said that the government should impose in his life in any way of which I am aware.

00:46:59.000 None of that.

00:47:01.000 Right?

00:47:01.000 He is free to engage in whatever he wants to engage in so long as it does not harm another human being.

00:47:05.000 Okay, but I am fully free to say that I believe that he engages in sinful activity.

00:47:11.000 I am fully free to do that without that constituting a harm.

00:47:13.000 But if you're an expressive individualist, if you believe that the chief goal of happiness is to define yourself without regard to what others believe, but others have to mirror your own self-belief, this is how you end up with a 2,000-year-old institution called the Catholic Church needs to be destroyed because I, Don Lemon, have hurt feelings.

00:47:29.000 All of religion has to change because my God doesn't, my view of God doesn't comport with traditional religious views.

00:47:29.000 Right?

00:47:36.000 And my view of God says that everything I do ever is right.

00:47:39.000 And because my view of God says that, if you believe that God does not think that that is right, this means that you are intolerant and bad.

00:47:47.000 So again, one of the things that you are seeing here from the left, on a broader religious level here, is the attempt to impute bigotry to people who have religious beliefs rooted in natural law.

00:47:59.000 And the attempt to impute emotivism to your political opposition.

00:48:02.000 Emotivism is a term coined by Aleister McIntyre, the Catholic theologian, I believe he teaches over at University of Notre Dame.

00:48:09.000 And Alistair McIntyre, who wrote a great book called The After Virtue that is totally worth the read, he talks about emotivism as one of the chief mechanisms of American society at this point.

00:48:18.000 Is that we don't actually, we don't believe that people's arguments come from a place of logic and reason.

00:48:24.000 We believe that people's arguments come from a place of emotional, of emotionality.

00:48:30.000 And because we believe that, it is easy to attribute to somebody who has a different belief some form of animus.

00:48:34.000 And that's what you see from Don Lemon right there.

00:48:36.000 He can't credit people who disagree with him on the nature of sin with a different premise on what God does and what God is for and what is to be derived from nature and natural law.

00:48:44.000 He can't do that.

00:48:45.000 Instead, it comes from bigotry.

00:48:46.000 And you have to redo your entire church to comply with Don Lemon's view of God so that he feels better about himself.

00:48:53.000 In fact, Don Lemon has other thoughts on Jesus.

00:48:55.000 Did you know this?

00:48:56.000 So he has thoughts on God.

00:48:58.000 Apparently God exists, but is nonjudgmental and is basically just your high school diversity advisor.

00:49:06.000 That's who God is.

00:49:07.000 God is just a being who created you to do whatever the hell you want without any level of judgment and without any requirements for your behavior, which means that he's utterly irrelevant.

00:49:15.000 There is no reason to have God if that is what you believe.

00:49:18.000 And then Don Lemon also believes that the way to cure American racism Is to teach that Jesus wasn't white.

00:49:25.000 Man, Sunday school lessons with Don Lemon are weird.

00:49:27.000 I gotta tell you, this is a weird Sunday school with Don Lemon.

00:49:31.000 We also have to start being realistic about God and the Bible.

00:49:35.000 And if you are a person of faith in this country, and we know America is built on faith and religious freedom, then we have to, I think, a good way of starting is to present the true identity of Jesus.

00:49:48.000 And that is as a black or a brown person, rather than someone who looks like a white hippie from Sweden or Norway.

00:49:55.000 Then we can come to a true reality about what America really is and then try to figure out how we fix this issue of racism in the country.

00:50:06.000 I have a question.

00:50:07.000 What in the actual F is he talking about?

00:50:10.000 Like seriously, what is he talking about?

00:50:12.000 Everyone knows, who has studied the Bible, that Jesus was not, in fact, of Nordic persuasion.

00:50:18.000 Jesus was a Jew, right?

00:50:21.000 He was from Judea.

00:50:22.000 He was a Jew, okay?

00:50:23.000 He probably looked like my father-in-law, who's from Morocco.

00:50:27.000 He was not a black person.

00:50:28.000 If by black you mean he was African, No.

00:50:33.000 No, that is not true.

00:50:35.000 So, no on that.

00:50:37.000 Also, every single person who has ever read the New Testament understands that Jesus was Jewish.

00:50:42.000 It's one of the fundamental bases of the New Testament, is that Jesus was a Jew.

00:50:49.000 Anybody who believes that Jesus was not a Jew is just ignoring the text of the New Testament.

00:50:53.000 Just ignoring it straight out.

00:50:56.000 So I'm pretty sure that everyone kind of knows that Jesus was a Jew.

00:51:00.000 And you know what that means?

00:51:01.000 And by the way, what in the world does the perspective on traditional values have to do with the racial identity of Jesus?

00:51:08.000 He can't explain this.

00:51:10.000 So, we are now in a world in which God is the golden calf.

00:51:15.000 This is what's truly amazing, is that people like Don Lemon, talking about God here, God is just the golden calf.

00:51:21.000 So if you read the Bible, if you read the Book of Exodus, then the people, when Moses goes up on the mountain the second time, he goes back up on the mountain, he goes for 40 days.

00:51:29.000 It's a pretty good story, I'll still tell it.

00:51:31.000 Moses goes back on the mountain for 40 days after having given the Ten Commandments with God's help.

00:51:37.000 Or rather, the other way around.

00:51:38.000 God gives the Ten Commandments with Moses' help.

00:51:40.000 So Moses goes back up the mountain for 40 days.

00:51:42.000 He stays too long, and the people downstairs get upset, and they get angry, and they're not sure where the leader went, and so they decide to erect a golden calf.

00:51:49.000 They go to Aaron, who is Moses' brother, and they say, we need a golden calf to lead us now.

00:51:54.000 And so Aaron, who's afraid that they're going to kill him, he says, give me all your gold, and he throws the gold into the fire, and out comes the golden calf.

00:52:01.000 Okay, the golden calf is bad.

00:52:03.000 It's bad, right?

00:52:04.000 The golden calf is a representation of the idea that human beings are apt to create their own gods, and those gods are apt to be reflective of them.

00:52:12.000 Because when people create their own moral standards and then attribute that to God, that is a deep, deep sin.

00:52:19.000 To pretend that God agrees with you, rather than you agreeing with God, is in fact to make a mockery of God.

00:52:26.000 In fact, my friend Dennis Prager, this is his entire take on the commandment in the Bible that you're not allowed to take the Lord's name in vain.

00:52:31.000 He says that God really doesn't care if you say GD.

00:52:34.000 What God really cares about is the idea that you are taking your own opinion then attributing it to God.

00:52:39.000 But this is what Don Lemon is doing now, right?

00:52:41.000 He is saying that he gets to define who Jesus was, he gets to define who God was, and if his definition does not meet with the Bible's definition, the Bible's wrong.

00:52:48.000 The Vatican's wrong, you see.

00:52:51.000 All these institutions are wrong.

00:52:52.000 Traditional institutions are wrong.

00:52:54.000 They must be torn down on behalf of our golden calf.

00:52:56.000 And our golden calf is our own values.

00:52:58.000 So take a back seat.

00:52:59.000 Sit down.

00:53:00.000 Your values don't matter any longer.

00:53:02.000 And by the way, Joe Biden agrees with this.

00:53:04.000 Devout Catholic Joe Biden agrees with this.

00:53:07.000 Because Joe Biden Says that he is a devout Catholic, but also disagrees with fundamental Catholic doctrinal points.

00:53:14.000 He's not even doing the Mario Cuomo idea, where Mario Cuomo suggested that this was his original formulation, that he was not a personal believer in abortion, but he didn't want to use American law to cram that down.

00:53:24.000 I think it's a bad political argument when it comes to the protection of human life, but at least you can see the division there.

00:53:29.000 I personally, in my life, believe X, and I abide by the doctrine of the Catholic Church, but I don't believe that that ought to be imposed at the top level.

00:53:36.000 Right?

00:53:37.000 I, as an Orthodox Jew, believe the same thing.

00:53:38.000 I believe in the Sabbath.

00:53:39.000 I don't think it's the government's job to force everybody to comply with the Sabbath.

00:53:43.000 But that is not what Joe Biden is claiming.

00:53:45.000 Joe Biden says he does not agree on same-sex marriage.

00:53:47.000 He does not agree on abortion.

00:53:49.000 But he's a devout Catholic.

00:53:50.000 That's a form of idolatry.

00:53:52.000 What Don Lemon is doing here is a form of idolatry.

00:53:54.000 The entire left, leftist ideology, is idolatry.

00:53:58.000 It is the positioning of a God that is other than actual monotheistic Judeo-Christian God.

00:54:05.000 And by the way, even Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, right?

00:54:07.000 It's an entirely different concept of what God is.

00:54:10.000 God is just your friend who's supposed to pat you on the shoulder and tell you you did a good job no matter what you did.

00:54:14.000 God is your high school guidance counselor.

00:54:17.000 And a gumball machine, by the way, because if you ask something of God and he doesn't give it to you, then that's because God is bad.

00:54:21.000 It's not your fault.

00:54:22.000 It's not that you ever have to change.

00:54:24.000 That is a recipe for complete institutional collapse.

00:54:26.000 The left knows this, which is why they are pushing it.

00:54:30.000 That's why the attack on the Vatican matters.

00:54:31.000 Not because I think that I give a damn what Don Lemon actually thinks of religion, but because it is indicative of a broader left-wing assault on religion as an outgrowth of animus, as an outgrowth of bigotry.

00:54:42.000 It is why it's such a mistake for folks on the right not to argue in terms of natural law.

00:54:46.000 Not to argue in terms of personal happiness or what identity actually constitutes, and instead to sort of do this rearguard action where the right doesn't defend its own religious precepts.

00:54:55.000 Instead they're like, yeah, just leave us alone and we have the right to do what we want to do.

00:54:59.000 All of that is true, but they're not going to leave you alone.

00:55:00.000 So you're going to have to argue for the value of your own positions.

00:55:03.000 You're going to have to explain why your positions are correct, why there is natural law to back them.

00:55:08.000 The left is intolerant and they will not leave you alone.

00:55:10.000 If you're a religious person and you have shied away from the fight, if you're a religious person and you think, okay, I'm just going to lead my life and they'll leave their lives and everyone will be fine with each other.

00:55:19.000 No, they're going to make you bake the cake.

00:55:21.000 They're going to make you mirror their own beliefs.

00:55:23.000 And they're going to declare that you are godless if you don't do what they want you to do.

00:55:28.000 They're gonna declare that all these institutions have to be torn down, and what do you get for going along with them?

00:55:33.000 All you get for going along with them is a temporary reprieve, because next time they disagree with you on something, they'll tear you down right over again.

00:55:40.000 They will just do it right again.

00:55:42.000 Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.

00:55:47.000 The Matt Wall Show, airing 1.30 p.m.

00:55:48.000 Eastern.

00:55:48.000 Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.

00:55:50.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:55:51.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:55:53.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by...

00:55:59.000 by Elliot Feld, executive producer Jeremy Boren, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky. Editing is by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Coromina, hair and makeup is by Fabiola Christina, production assistant is Jessica Kranz.

00:56:14.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.

00:56:18.000 On the Matt Wall Show we talk about the things that matter.

00:56:22.000 Real issues that affect you, your family, our country.

00:56:24.000 Not just politics, but culture, faith, current events, all the fundamentals.

The WaPo’s Massive Trump Retraction | Ep. 1216

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