The Ben Shapiro Show - Who Blew Up The Ukrainian Dam?? Someone's Lying

00:00:00.000 So, it's pretty clear that everybody lies during a war, but it is unclear exactly who is telling the truth during a war.

00:00:07.000 So when you look at what's happening in Ukraine right now, there are a slew of headlines that are coming out all the time about Russian atrocities against Ukraine.

00:00:14.000 A huge number of those are true.

00:00:15.000 But Russia is also claiming Ukrainian atrocities against Russians.

00:00:19.000 And the latest atrocity that is claimed by the Russians against the Ukrainians and the Ukrainians against the Russians is the blowing up of a massive dam.

00:00:26.000 This is in Mykolaiv, Ukraine.

00:00:28.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, a major dam and power station in a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine were destroyed on Tuesday, narrowing Ukraine's options for a planned counteroffensive in the South by unleashing a torrent of water that caused serious flooding.

00:00:39.000 Now, here's the thing.

00:00:40.000 It's very unclear who blew up this dam.

00:00:42.000 And it is a massive dam.

00:00:43.000 I mean, the film of the dam being blown up is pretty astonishing.

00:00:48.000 You can see it's flooding pretty much all the outlying areas.

00:00:52.000 The Ukrainians are saying that it was Russia and that the goal of the Russians blowing up a dam that is actually in territory that they currently control is to force the closure of a Ukrainian counter-offensive that was likely to take place.

00:01:04.000 That essentially you flood the area so the Ukrainians cannot attack the area. 0.98

00:01:09.000 Ukraine says that it forced the evacuation of thousands from dozens of towns and villages on the Dnipro River and could create an aquatic buffer zone for Russian forces on the southeastern bank.

00:01:17.000 Meanwhile, Russia is accusing Kiev of sabotaging the dam, saying, why in the world would we blow up a dam that is largely flooding areas that we currently control, including the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant?

00:01:29.000 German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a televised interview, all things considered, one must naturally assume this was an aggression perpetrated by the Russian side in order to stop Ukraine's offensive aimed at liberating its own land.

00:01:38.000 The destruction of the dams said the Ukrainians could win Russia time to reconfigure its defenses while at the same time depriving Ukraine of some options for its expected counter offensive. 0.67

00:01:47.000 Russia presumably could then redeploy forces into this particular area.

00:01:52.000 But, here's the thing, military analysts had already seen a Ukrainian assault across the river as an unlikely option, given the difficulty and likely cost of such an operation, as well as Ukraine's lack of amphibious capabilities.

00:02:02.000 There is an upside for Ukraine, which is the flooding could wash away fortifications and minefields put up by Russian forces in the area. 0.92

00:02:08.000 It could, again, in sort of the worldview, make Russia the creator of all atrocities. 0.80

00:02:14.000 The dam had already suffered damage in October when sections of it and sluice gates were destroyed as Russian forces sought to retreat from Kherson amid an ultimately successful Ukrainian offensive.

00:02:23.000 Right now, the United States says that they are withholding judgment.

00:02:26.000 John Kirby said, we're still trying to assess what exactly happened here.

00:02:29.000 The Russians had illegally taken over that dam in the reservoir many months ago.

00:02:31.000 They were occupying it while it was being destroyed.

00:02:33.000 So again, if they were occupying it and controlling it, why would they destroy it?

00:02:37.000 A reporter did ask John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesperson, this question, and he didn't have an amazing answer.

00:02:44.000 Does it seem believable to you that Russia would destroy a dam and flood ethnic Russian villages and cut off the water supply to Crimea?

00:02:54.000 I mean, that doesn't seem logical.

00:02:56.000 It seems about as logical as blowing up one's own pipeline, doesn't it?

00:03:01.000 We've come to no conclusions on this.

00:03:02.000 We're working with the Ukrainians.

00:03:03.000 We'll try to get as much information as we can.

00:03:08.000 Okay, so he's withholding judgment, but you would imagine that the United States is going to come pretty quickly to the conclusion that it must have been the Russians.

00:03:16.000 But it's clearly not obviously the Russians.

00:03:19.000 Again, there's some evidence suggesting that maybe it was the Russians, and then there's some evidence suggesting that maybe it was the Ukrainians.

00:03:23.000 Plus, there's a certain problem here with regard to the nuclear facility that is in the nearby area.

00:03:29.000 The destruction, according to the Wall Street Journal, could affect the water supply to that nuclear power plant, which relies on the reservoir to cool its reactors, according to experts.

00:03:36.000 A spokesman for Ukraine's state nuclear energy company said water levels in the Khokhova Reservoir that supplied water to the facility were rapidly decreasing.

00:03:43.000 They said that right now, the levels inside the plant's cooling pond were sufficient to prevent a nuclear meltdown.

00:03:49.000 But again, it is totally unclear who is doing what.

00:03:53.000 And this raises a serious problem in terms of the credibility of the West.

00:03:57.000 Normally, you would want to say, well, you know, we'll let the intelligence sources come to their conclusions.

00:04:02.000 We'll let the American government come to its conclusion.

00:04:03.000 We'll let the EU come to their conclusions.

00:04:05.000 And then who are you going to believe?

00:04:06.000 The United States and the EU or the Russians? 0.74

00:04:08.000 That would normally be what you would do.

00:04:10.000 But there is a problem.

00:04:11.000 A precedent has been set here that the entire West will apparently lie about things that they clearly knew were caused by the Ukrainians in order to shield the Ukrainians from blowback. 0.51

00:04:20.000 Now again, it's a war.

00:04:22.000 In a war when there are two sides, everybody has an interest in lying.

00:04:25.000 And that does happen all the time.

00:04:27.000 The Russians lie, the Ukrainians lie. 1.00

00:04:28.000 Lying is just part of war propaganda.

00:04:30.000 It's happened since literally the beginning of war.

00:04:33.000 With that said, the United States is a democracy.

00:04:36.000 The citizens are entitled to actually hear the truth about what is going on in this war.

00:04:40.000 The reason that I think so many people doubt accounts from the West, from Ukraine, is because of things like the attack on the Nord Stream Pipeline.

00:04:48.000 So you'll recall that the United States quickly came to the conclusion that the Russians had bombed their own pipeline, which of course made no sense at all because the Russians could just, you know, turn off the spigot. 0.67

00:04:58.000 Well, it turns out that not only did the United States come to the wrong conclusion on that, they knew they were coming to the wrong conclusion, according to the Washington Post.

00:05:06.000 Three months before saboteurs bombed the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, the Biden administration learned from a close ally that the Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

00:05:20.000 So first they claimed it was the Russians, then they claimed it was some sort of Ukrainian splinter group, and now it turns out that months before the actual attack on Nord Stream, The Ukrainian military from the top levels was planning an attack on the Nord Stream Pipeline and the United States knew about it.

00:05:32.000 Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were collected by a European intelligence service and shared with the CIA in June of 2022.

00:05:39.000 They provide some of the most specific evidence to date linking the government of Ukraine to the eventual attack in the Baltic Sea with U.S.

00:05:44.000 and Western officials who called a brazen, dangerous act of sabotage on Europe's energy infrastructure.

00:05:49.000 The European intelligence report was shared on Discord allegedly by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira and the Washington Post obtained a copy from one of Teixeira's online friends.

00:05:58.000 Which again, leads to the question is whether the United States knew all along that this was in fact the Ukrainians and then lied about it in order to jack up support for the Ukraine war by blaming the Russians for something the Ukrainians clearly did.

00:06:09.000 In fact, John Kirby was asked specifically about the Nord Stream Pipeline and this report.

00:06:14.000 We'll get to his response in just one moment first.

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00:07:15.000 So, John Kirby yesterday was asked about the Nord Stream report, about the fact the United States apparently knew, three months in advance of the Nord Stream attack, that it was the Ukrainians planning an attack on Nord Stream, and then the attack happens, and the United States and the entire West blame the Russians.

00:07:28.000 Here is John Kirby trying to run away from that.

00:07:30.000 Is the US actively investigating?

00:07:33.000 No.

00:07:34.000 Why not?

00:07:35.000 There are three European countries that have embarked on independent investigations of

00:07:42.000 this and we're comfortable in their ability to take a hard look at this and to come up

00:07:47.000 with conclusions.

00:07:48.000 Bye.

00:07:49.000 Weird, because the United States will investigate just about anything.

00:07:52.000 In fact, they say that they're going to look into who blew up this Russian dam, Russian-controlled dam.

00:07:59.000 All of this undermines the credibility of the war effort.

00:08:01.000 Truly.

00:08:02.000 I think that the mistake that so many national security officials make is they treat everything as classified and secret.

00:08:07.000 And then when it turns out they were lying to people, people are like, well, maybe you're lying about the whole thing.

00:08:11.000 Maybe you're lying about the whole thing.

00:08:13.000 Maybe it turns out that you have some ulterior motives for wanting to support Ukraine in the way that you do.

00:08:19.000 So if you want to undermine the war effort, they're doing an amazing job of doing it.

00:08:23.000 You can't blame people for looking at the narratives that are being spun out by the Biden White House or by the EU or by the Ukrainian government, for that matter, and then say, well.

00:08:31.000 You know, I have my doubts.

00:08:34.000 Again, literally all the things that they said five years ago were true about Ukraine, they now say are no longer true.

00:08:38.000 The New York Times, as we discussed yesterday, ran an entire piece soft-pedaling Nazism in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, in the Azov Battalion.

00:08:45.000 Well, five years ago, they were writing articles about anti-Semitism in the Azov Battalion.

00:08:49.000 Like, five years ago, it was Joe Biden himself who was out there talking about corruption inside Ukraine and how it needed to be cleaned up.

00:08:55.000 Now we're supposed to believe that Ukraine is clean as the driven day. 0.96

00:08:57.000 Now, the thing about all of this is that none of that is necessary. 0.99

00:09:01.000 It's an assumption that people are absolute morons and that you can't just tell them the truth. 0.98

00:09:06.000 And that assumption leads people to a sense of expected moral clarity from government that they are not supposed to receive and that they actually should not trust in. 0.99

00:09:15.000 The truth is that foreign policy, international relations, it's about power.

00:09:19.000 It's about interests.

00:09:20.000 It is not generally about the sole question of morality.

00:09:25.000 Morality lurks in the background, of course.

00:09:26.000 You want to support the side that you think is morally better than the other side.

00:09:30.000 But that's usually a comparative problem.

00:09:31.000 It's very rare that you're going to support somebody who is absolutely wonderful against somebody who's absolutely evil.

00:09:37.000 That is a rarity.

00:09:39.000 As soon as a little bit of nuance comes in, Then you're going to have to revert to the reality, which is that power politics matters.

00:09:46.000 As I've said all along, the justification for the Russia war And the Ukrainian war against Russia?

00:09:51.000 On Ukraine's part, it was a defensive war, but the reason the United States is involved in Ukraine is not because the Ukrainians are so unbelievably wonderful and the Russians are so unbelievably evil or anything like that.

00:10:01.000 It's because it is in America's interest to prevent Russians from invading surrounding countries and gathering resources to themselves they can then weaponize against the West. 0.87

00:10:09.000 That is the actual purpose, if you're talking just solely in terms of American interests.

00:10:13.000 I think most Americans can understand that.

00:10:15.000 That also means that when you're looking for an off-ramp in places like Ukraine, you determine as an American, what are the interests that we have achieved, and what are the further interests that we hope to achieve, and how do we hope to achieve those interests?

00:10:24.000 None of those questions are being asked right now, because we are supposed to believe in this moral binary, and in order to prop up the pure moral binary, The administration will clearly lie about things like Nord Stream.

00:10:36.000 And then when an actual atrocity happens, like blowing up a dam and flooding villagers, thousands of villagers, and putting a nuclear power plant in danger, then who are you supposed to trust on that?

00:10:45.000 And the answer is, you have no idea.

00:10:48.000 Again, lies generally lead to confusion, and that confusion actually undermines the point that many of our elites are trying to make.

00:10:54.000 Okay, meanwhile, the other big controversy of the day in terms of international relations that the PGA Tour has demonstrated, in like fashion, that power matters and money matters, According to the Wall Street Journal, the PGA Tour and Live Golf, that is the Saudi-backed upstart that sent the industry into chaos when it teed off last year, have now agreed to a stunning merger that ends the divide that has dominated the sport for the last year.

00:11:14.000 The deal weds the Saudi money and the PGA Tour name and connects, after months of bruising litigation and sharply traded accusations, it consolidates the biggest assets in professional golf.

00:11:23.000 The same Saudi gushers that have funded LIV will now be pooled with the PGA Tour's existing revenue streams, giving the combined entity vast new resources for unnamed future investments.

00:11:31.000 It effectively makes the Saudis investors in U.S. 0.90

00:11:34.000 golf's legacy powerhouse, a move that carries risk for the PGA Tour because they've spent the last year yelling about the moral evil of LIV existing.

00:11:42.000 So basically what happened is that the PGA Tour was paying the golfers a certain amount of money.

00:11:45.000 Liv came along and they said, and this is the Saudi royal family, they came along and said, we'd like to get into the golfing business.

00:11:50.000 We like golf and we think a lot of these golfers are underpaid.

00:11:52.000 So we're going to offer them more money.

00:11:53.000 And then the PGA Tour yelled at those golfers and said, wow, you guys, I can't believe you guys are so venal. 0.80

00:11:59.000 You're so greedy, taking Saudi money. 0.96

00:12:01.000 How dare you? 0.87

00:12:03.000 In fact, here is a flashback of the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, ripping LiveGolf and suggesting that the golfers who are now taking money from LiveGolf were somehow complicit in 9-11 or some such nonsense.

00:12:16.000 9-11 Families United sent a letter to the representatives of Phil, Dustin, Bryson, Reed and others, quote, expressing their outrage towards the golfers for participating in the new league and accusing them of sports washing and betraying the United States, end quote.

00:12:35.000 That's gotten a lot of steam over the last 24 hours.

00:12:38.000 That story first reported again in the New York Post.

00:12:41.000 How much did you talk to your players about the possible ramifications if they sign on with the new league?

00:12:48.000 Well, I talked to players.

00:12:50.000 I've talked at a player meeting and I've talked to a number of players individually for a long period of time.

00:12:59.000 And I think you'd have to be living under a rock to not know that there are significant implications.

00:13:07.000 So, super bad.

00:13:08.000 You're a big golfer and you took a lot more money.

00:13:11.000 Phil Mickelson, Brooks Koepka, that if you actually went to Live Golf because they were paying you more money, this made you complicit in moral evil.

00:13:18.000 Remember, Phil Mickelson was ripped up and down for taking Live Tour money.

00:13:22.000 And it was the PGA that was leading that charge.

00:13:24.000 Not because they were so morally pure, the PGA Tour, but because the PGA Tour wanted all of those golfers to come and golf for them for less money.

00:13:32.000 Well, now they've decided that money talks.

00:13:34.000 Because in the end, folks, follow the money and follow the power.

00:13:37.000 Power and money are usually the motivations for major actions, whether that is corporate or whether that is governmental.

00:13:43.000 It is very rarely only a moral question.

00:13:45.000 Now, that doesn't mean that moral questions don't come into play.

00:13:47.000 It doesn't mean that people don't try to wed their morality to power and money.

00:13:50.000 They do.

00:13:51.000 But it does mean that when those two things come into conflict, very often the money wins or the power wins.

00:13:55.000 And that is particularly the case when it comes to the PGA Tour and Live Golf.

00:14:00.000 Again, just an example of how money walks.

00:14:02.000 We'll get to that in one moment.

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00:15:08.000 Okay, so.

00:15:09.000 You heard the head of the PGA Tour talking about the moral evil of golfers taking the money from LiveGolf, but now it turns out that the PGA Tour is taking the money directly from LiveGolf.

00:15:21.000 Apparently, again, Texas Republican Congressman Chip Roy, who championed the PGA Tour's fight, he said, I wonder if the PGA Tour, having wrapped itself in the flag, invited 9-11 families to the big announcement.

00:15:31.000 I guess not, because money was worth more than principle, apparently.

00:15:35.000 That obviously is true.

00:15:36.000 Here's the PGA Tour commissioner you heard one moment ago talking about the moral qualms he had about people joining LiveTour being like, well, but they do have a lot of money.

00:15:45.000 You're describing a scenario under which PIF at some point could have the majority of the economics, correct me if I'm wrong, of this entity.

00:15:55.000 Essentially, the Saudis sort of, people will say, oh, they control golf around the world. 1.00

00:15:59.000 I'm just curious as to what you think the response is going to be.

00:16:02.000 Well, listen, a lot of people have been reading about the tension.

00:16:08.000 And that, we've talked a lot.

00:16:10.000 And I said previously that we were going down our path, they were going down theirs. 0.75

00:16:16.000 And today, that tension goes away.

00:16:18.000 The litigation is dropped.

00:16:20.000 We're announcing to the world that on behalf of this game, we're coming together.

00:16:26.000 And it's less about how people respond today, and it's all about how people respond in 10 years.

00:16:33.000 And when they see the impact that we're having on this game together, there'll be a lot of smiles on people's faces, and there'll be a lot more people playing this game all over the world.

00:16:44.000 Well, that is awkward.

00:16:45.000 That is awkward.

00:16:46.000 So you basically ripped your potential business partners as terrorist supporters, and then you made a deal with them, and you expect that nobody is going to notice?

00:16:53.000 Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said in an interview that Monaghan had actually urged him and other lawmakers to scrutinize the national security implications of the Saudi project.

00:17:00.000 Quote, They came to my office and told me it would be a moral outrage for Saudi Arabia to have an ownership stake in a major American sport.

00:17:06.000 The announcement speaks for itself as to what really matters.

00:17:09.000 Okay, now this has something to say not just about corporate priorities, but about American priorities more generally.

00:17:15.000 The corporate priorities are pretty obvious.

00:17:16.000 And there are a lot of people who say, why are corporations going and doing business in China?

00:17:19.000 They should just stop doing business in China.

00:17:21.000 Just stop making product in China. 0.99

00:17:23.000 China's an evil dictatorship.

00:17:25.000 Or we should stop doing business with the Saudis. 1.00

00:17:28.000 And the answer is that if you're a corporation, you go where it is cheapest and most productive to produce the product.

00:17:34.000 If there are national security problems, it is up to the government of the United States to prevent investment in places like China or places like Saudi Arabia.

00:17:41.000 But the reality is the U.S.

00:17:43.000 government Also wants it both ways.

00:17:45.000 They want to be able to morally posture, and then at the same time, pretend that they're not morally posturing when they go and sign a deal with Saudis, right? 0.96

00:17:50.000 It's the same thing that, basically, the PGA Tours just did the same thing Joe Biden did. 1.00

00:17:54.000 Joe Biden, back in 2020, was like, Saudi Arabia is a horrible, evil, terrible, no good, very bad place, filled with murderers and scum. 0.99

00:18:03.000 And then 2021 comes, and the midterms are coming, and he's like, well, you know, we could use some oil from you guys. 1.00

00:18:09.000 And Sad is like, screw you.

00:18:12.000 It turns out that power matters an awful lot when it comes to politics and when it comes to corporate money. 0.99

00:18:17.000 Morality generally takes a backseat to the money.

00:18:20.000 Now, when the two can be aligned, or when you can get away with shoving your morality into the guys with power in politics, then you do it.

00:18:28.000 But, when the two come into conflict, everybody just goes weapons down, which is pretty amazing.

00:18:32.000 Here's John Kirby yesterday, being asked about the merger between Live Golf and the PGA Tour.

00:18:37.000 Now, back in 2020, Joe Biden would have had some word about this.

00:18:39.000 Now, apparently, the administration's like, well, who cares, whatever.

00:18:43.000 Does the Biden administration have any concern with a major U.S.

00:18:47.000 sports league getting into business with the Saudi public investment fund?

00:18:52.000 I think we'll let the Saudi government speak to that.

00:18:56.000 So, he's just going to leave that one out there on the table.

00:18:59.000 Okay, the lesson for all of us, the big takeaway for all of us is that you should follow the

00:19:03.000 money and you should follow the power.

00:19:05.000 And when people start to morally preen and posture, you should ask them a very simple

00:19:08.000 question.

00:19:09.000 If the mathematics changed, if the money changed, if the interests changed, would you still

00:19:12.000 hold by that?

00:19:13.000 And if the answer is you wouldn't, then we know where your actual priorities lie.

00:19:17.000 We know where the priorities lie for the United States government when it comes to a lot of conflicts around the world, and that's as long as it supports American interests in a real hard-headed way, that's okay.

00:19:26.000 We can all live with that.

00:19:27.000 That's realism.

00:19:28.000 It's when you start to do things that are not in America's interest and you preen morally, and then we know that if the interests shift, you will shift, then we start to have some serious questions.

00:19:36.000 The same thing about corporate America.

00:19:37.000 Like, don't woke-scold everybody about how you are very much in favor of all these social liberal causes of the day, and then the minute somebody comes at you with money, the Pride Progress flag goes down and the Chinese flag goes up if you're Nike.

00:19:50.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

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00:20:55.000 Okay, so speaking of corporate corruption and where their priorities lie, take a look at Nike.

00:21:01.000 So Nike does massive business in China, of course.

00:21:03.000 They've been doing massive business in China for decades.

00:21:07.000 And this means that the same people who are promoting Colin Kaepernick kneeling for the American flag are perfectly happy to kneel before the Chinese flag.

00:21:14.000 And the same people who are not going to be promoting Pride Progress over in Shanghai are certainly going to be promoting it here in the United States.

00:21:21.000 So basically what they do is they make their money by working with authoritarian regimes and then they cram down their social liberal agenda at home.

00:21:27.000 Which is the worst form of moral perversion.

00:21:31.000 You're willing to kowtow to the world's worst people in order so that you can tell decent Americans that they're wrong about traditional morality.

00:21:37.000 That's essentially the Nike business model at this point, and it is super insulting.

00:21:40.000 The latest iteration of this is Daily Wire has now been leaked in email from inside Nike.

00:21:46.000 And it shows that the company will host a talk with a child sex change surgeon to celebrate Pride Month.

00:21:52.000 Nike will also host a drag story time along with other other Pride events.

00:21:57.000 According to this email, quote, team, this summer, the Nike United Pride Network has the honor

00:22:01.000 of once again spotlighting and celebrating the past, present and future

00:22:04.000 of our global LGBTQIA plus community.

00:22:07.000 We're thrilled to have a phenomenal lineup of events and activities this June and July.

00:22:10.000 This year's theme is together we are undeniable unless you're in China.

00:22:15.000 If you're in China, it's totally deniable as it turns out. 1.00

00:22:18.000 The LGBTQIA plus minus divided by sign community continues to fight for equality. 0.89

00:22:22.000 Their fight to be themselves and to force you to comply.

00:22:25.000 Together, we are undeniable centers around determination, celebrating icons of the community.

00:22:31.000 So this is very exciting stuff here from Nike.

00:22:34.000 And again, it is going to feature Dr. Blair Peters of the Oregon Health and Science University for a July 11th panel discussion.

00:22:41.000 Peters has publicly admitted to performing irreversible sex change surgery.

00:22:45.000 Gender-affirming top surgery in the common parlance on adolescent girls.

00:22:50.000 Solid stuff right here.

00:22:52.000 Also, they will be hosting a family-friendly drag story hour on July 13th.

00:22:56.000 According to Nike, quote, you will have an opportunity to cultivate

00:22:58.000 an undeniable sense of community.

00:23:00.000 Undeniable.

00:23:01.000 If you deny it, well, you're violating the rules.

00:23:02.000 It's undeniable.

00:23:03.000 And belonging with your Nike teammates through activations like a family-friendly drag story time.

00:23:08.000 So here's a clip of this doctor that Nike is bringing in to talk to its staff about the magic of gender transition.

00:23:14.000 It was over time as I started engaging more and more with the queer, trans, and gender diverse population

00:23:21.000 that I really felt comfortable and started encountering people that looked like

00:23:26.000 and felt like I felt and learned the language that they use and then really found the labels that I apply to myself,

00:23:33.000 which are queer, gender diverse, and that's where I live.

00:23:37.000 I'm Blair Peters.

00:23:38.000 I use he, they pronouns. 0.99

00:23:39.000 I'm a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at OHSU and I specialize in gender affirming and peripheral nerve surgery.

00:23:45.000 I describe gender-affirming surgery as using surgery to help someone physically actualize their internal sense of self.

00:23:53.000 So, I view surgery as changing something that makes someone feel different.

00:23:56.000 Yeah, your doctor walks into the room with this color hair and those glasses and you run screaming from the room.

00:24:00.000 That is what you should do.

00:24:01.000 You know, when someone sees their vulva for the first time and you can see that you've just lifted this huge burden off of them completely.

00:24:11.000 So glad Nike could push this sort of stuff.

00:24:14.000 Nike, which started as a running shoe company.

00:24:17.000 In Portland, Oregon, like rural Portland, Oregon.

00:24:20.000 And this is how far they've come.

00:24:21.000 Not in China, not in Saudi, not in the places where they actually, you know, manufacture their stuff.

00:24:26.000 But the propaganda is to their own staff.

00:24:28.000 So again, these are the rules of corporate America.

00:24:30.000 Corporate America making deals with the Saudis, making deals with the Chinese, making deals with some of the worst people on earth, all over the world for cash. 0.53

00:24:38.000 But then they lecture you about your morality.

00:24:40.000 They lecture you about why you are a bad person if you do not agree with the pride progress agenda.

00:24:47.000 That's the goal.

00:24:49.000 And then they leverage all of those corporate dollars to back politicians. 0.91

00:24:52.000 And those politicians then push that radical agenda.

00:24:55.000 Again, using dollars that are largely made overseas from authoritarian regimes where all the stuff is illegal in the first place.

00:25:01.000 It's truly insulting.

00:25:02.000 It's truly insulting.

00:25:03.000 And the backlash is just beginning.

00:25:06.000 The backlash has already begun, in fact, because it turns out that the American people don't have to sit there and take it.

00:25:11.000 If, as I say, people are happy to promote their left-wing morality so long as it doesn't ding their bottom line too severely, if you ding their bottom line severely, people back off of it.

00:25:22.000 This is why The Wall Street Journal has an entire piece titled, Companies That Embrace Social Issues Have Second Thoughts.

00:25:27.000 Well, good.

00:25:28.000 Well, good.

00:25:29.000 Keep going, guys.

00:25:30.000 Keep going.

00:25:31.000 The folks who listen to this program, who decide not to buy Bud Light, Keep going with that. 0.98

00:25:35.000 The people who decided that this month they're not going to shop at Target because Target is selling bathing suits for tucking your penis behind you so that you look more like a girl, and they're going to do this for young people? 0.95

00:25:45.000 And you decided, okay, well, I'm just going to shop at Walmart instead this month? 0.99

00:25:48.000 Good for you.

00:25:49.000 Keep it up.

00:25:50.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, in May, clothing company The North Face released a video for Pride Month featuring drag performer Patagonia.

00:25:56.000 The ad was similar to the one the performer had appeared in for the outdoor apparel maker a year earlier.

00:26:00.000 The reaction was not.

00:26:01.000 Within hours, calls for a boycott of the company spread on social media.

00:26:05.000 North Face wants to be the next Bud Light, one user wrote.

00:26:07.000 Aren't you supposed to learn from others' mistakes, another user said.

00:26:10.000 CEOs spent the past few years adjusting to a world in which investors, customers, and employees expected corporate leaders to align themselves with social causes.

00:26:17.000 Well, I mean, I love that sentence because the answer is that a small cadre of investors, customers and employees expected corporate leaders to mirror their politics.

00:26:25.000 But today that has made the company's targets in the U.S.

00:26:27.000 culture wars.

00:26:28.000 Well, no, the answer is you guys were the offenders in the culture wars and then people decided they had enough.

00:26:32.000 They were tired of being crammed down.

00:26:34.000 They were tired of being told to sit there and shut up if they don't agree with the left wing agenda.

00:26:39.000 Some CEOs are rethinking how or whether to weigh in on sensitive political or social matters with trans and other LGBTQ issues, particularly in the spotlight.

00:26:47.000 At PPG Industries, a Pittsburgh maker of glid and paint, coatings and other products, Chief Executive Tim Navish asked senior leaders at the company earlier this year to review its processes for engaging on polarizing topics.

00:26:58.000 Navish said he wanted the company to have a robust plan should it need to respond.

00:27:01.000 PPG uses an internal scoring system to determine if and when it makes sense for the company to comment on matters that may offend some of its customers and employees or affect its brands.

00:27:10.000 If executives decide to comment, they discuss how best to communicate.

00:27:13.000 We run a business, we don't run a political organization, said Navish.

00:27:17.000 We have to take all of this into account.

00:27:20.000 Executives are finding out how easy it is to leave everyone unhappy.

00:27:22.000 Well, no, actually, the way you leave everybody unhappy is by sounding off.

00:27:25.000 If you shut your face and you just give us the product that we want to buy, it turns out that nobody's really all that unhappy. 0.94

00:27:31.000 There will be some activists who bitch and moan, but everybody else will be just fine. 0.97

00:27:36.000 That is what happened when you flex your power in the marketplace.

00:27:39.000 It's also, by the way, what's happening across America as people begin to stand up to the predations of the woke mind virus and it's radical, and it's radical norm-changing.

00:27:52.000 There's an unbelievable video that has now emerged out of Glendale, California.

00:27:57.000 Armenian parents, so Glendale is a pretty conservative area, or more conservative than most of California, because it's heavily Armenian.

00:28:03.000 Armenians tend to be much more traditional.

00:28:05.000 They're very culturally In tune with their community.

00:28:12.000 And because of all of that, they were not willing to humor a school board pushing the LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign curriculum.

00:28:20.000 And chaos broke out when Antifa showed up to make trouble with people protesting.

00:28:24.000 Several hundred protesters gathered, many waving the American flags and, on the other side, LGBTQ plus pride flags outside the scheduled GUSD board meeting.

00:28:33.000 The opposing sides represented parents who oppose GUSD policies in support of the LGBTQ plus minus classroom curriculum.

00:28:41.000 Both sides took to social media to rally their supporters.

00:28:44.000 By the way, you can tell who's flying which flag in these particular tapes.

00:28:47.000 Antifa showed up and they started a fight with members of the Armenian community.

00:28:52.000 Again, this is an ethnic minority community that is very, very prevalent in Glendale.

00:28:56.000 They're wonderful people.

00:28:57.000 I know them very well.

00:28:58.000 I used to work in Glendale.

00:28:59.000 And here's some of the video.

00:29:01.000 You can see these Armenian protesters, and they're being polite with the cops.

00:29:11.000 And then Antifa is going to show up and start making trouble, because this is, in fact, what they do.

00:29:18.000 Here's Antifa, they're starting to get violent with people.

00:29:21.000 The Armenians are having none of it, as well they should not. 1.00

00:29:27.000 Again, the police have to break it up.

00:29:30.000 By the way, Antifa's gonna lose this battle. 1.00

00:29:33.000 Seriously, Antifa versus the Armenians? 1.00

00:29:35.000 I take the Armenians. 0.98

00:29:37.000 And the points every time, man.

00:29:39.000 That is not even a question.

00:29:42.000 Love the Armenians, they're awesome.

00:29:43.000 Several parents told Glendale's board they were concerned with Glendale's trans policies, such as allowing students of the opposite sex to use the same bathrooms and locker rooms, putting their kids at risk.

00:29:51.000 One father told the board, quote, I graduated from Glendale in 96, as according to the Daily Signal, I have two daughters.

00:29:55.000 My daughter's afraid to change in the locker room because she knows another guy could come into the room. 1.00

00:29:58.000 When I asked the principal, he told me there were no cross-gender bathroom policies.

00:30:02.000 Other parents previously had told the Daily Signal their children changed in locker rooms with students of the opposite sex multiple times, and this is now standard practice in Glendale.

00:30:11.000 So, you know, good for me.

00:30:14.000 By the way, this is going to be part of the future of the country, is that essentially what you have is a cadre of upper-class white liberals who have a particular set of morals that do not match the morals of particularly ethnic minorities in the United States. 0.69

00:30:30.000 And the backlash is going to be very, very strong.

00:30:33.000 The weird brand of anti-heteronormativity that's now being promoted in the West is being promoted by a very elite group of people, and the vast majority of people are not into it.

00:30:42.000 They may be tolerant of people who decide on these fringe practices or alternative lifestyles, but you know what they're not into?

00:30:49.000 That becoming the norm.

00:30:50.000 And you know where that is particularly prevalent?

00:30:52.000 In exactly the diverse communities the Left pretends that it represents.

00:30:56.000 Armenians are just one example of that. 1.00

00:30:58.000 But overall, millennials are now moving to the right.

00:31:01.000 Gen Z males are moving to the right. 0.99

00:31:03.000 That is in pure reaction to the radical social agenda that's being promoted by the left.

00:31:08.000 Over at the New York Times, even Nate Cohn is noting it.

00:31:10.000 He says, millennials are not an exception.

00:31:11.000 They have moved to the right.

00:31:13.000 He says, 15 years ago, a new generation of young voters propelled Barack Obama to a decisive victory that augured a new era of democratic dominance.

00:31:19.000 15 years later, those once young voters aren't so young and they aren't quite so democratic.

00:31:24.000 In the 2020 presidential election, voters who were 18-29 in 2008 backed Biden 55-43.

00:31:29.000 The exit polls showed even closer, with Biden winning by just 51-45 among voters who were 18-27 in 2008.

00:31:37.000 That group voted radically large numbers for Barack Obama.

00:31:43.000 This shift to the right among young voters who propelled Obama to victory 15 years ago is part of a larger pattern, says Nate Cohen.

00:31:48.000 Over the last decade, almost every cohort of voters under 50 has shifted toward the right, based on analysis of thousands of survey interviews conducted at the Roper Center.

00:31:57.000 Again, the millennials of 2008 are not the same as those of 2016.

00:32:02.000 It is also worthwhile noting that these are cohorts, as we talk about younger cohorts, that are more minority-based.

00:32:08.000 These are less white cohorts, and they're becoming more right-wing.

00:32:11.000 Because the morality that's being promulgated by the folks at Discovery Plus is not mirrored by the rest of the country.

00:32:16.000 I mention Discovery Plus here because Discovery Plus during Pride Month has decided to run entire pieces about how Abraham Lincoln was now a gay man, who's a sparkly queer fellow, according to Discovery Plus. 0.59

00:32:26.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

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00:33:29.000 Also, if you're looking for something interesting to watch, check out our series, What We Saw, hosted by storyteller Bill Whittle.

00:33:34.000 Season one focused on Apollo 11.

00:33:35.000 Season two of what we saw is now in full swing.

00:33:38.000 In episode 13, President Nixon's visit to China introduces a three power dynamic, but Watergate undermines his administration and diminishes American morale.

00:33:45.000 Meanwhile, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan further exposes American weakness.

00:33:50.000 In this context, an older president brings renewed optimism, youthful vigor, and a plan to end the Cold War and achieve victory after four decades of stalemate.

00:33:57.000 Of course, that would be Ronald Reagan.

00:33:58.000 Bill makes you feel like you're there witnessing history.

00:34:00.000 Hear the amazing story in this week's episode of Cold War.

00:34:03.000 All episodes of Cold War are now available to stream.

00:34:05.000 You have to be a DailyWire Plus member to see it.

00:34:06.000 Go to dailywire.com slash coldwar to start watching.

00:34:10.000 So again, what we are seeing in the United States right now is a battle between a small cadre of left-wing radical activists, largely white, and the rest of the population.

00:34:19.000 And that includes a heavy dose of minority populations.

00:34:22.000 But one of the ways you can see this, by the way, is by the fact that Pete Buttigieg has no ratings whatsoever among non-upper-class white liberals.

00:34:29.000 If you are not an upper-class white liberal, you do not care about Pete Buttigieg, you are uninterested in Pete Buttigieg.

00:34:35.000 Mainly because he's pushing radical positions.

00:34:37.000 Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, is considered, again, by, like, the seven upper-class white liberals to be the guy, even though he's really botched it over at the Transportation Department after taking a two-month paternity leave.

00:34:49.000 Which made no sense.

00:34:50.000 My paternity leave, by the way, for my fourth child was, I believe, 24 hours?

00:34:54.000 One day?

00:34:55.000 And I have four kids, and my wife is a woman who actually gave birth from her body.

00:34:59.000 So there was that.

00:35:00.000 Anyway, Pete Buttigieg, he says that politicians are targeting the LGBTQ community to distract from radical positions.

00:35:07.000 The actual reverse is the truth.

00:35:09.000 That the left-wing politicians are talking about every other issue and pretending those issues are important to distract from their actual radical policy positions on things like LGBTQ+.

00:35:19.000 Now you see the attacks on the LGBTQ community, especially on the trans community, and what they are going through, and I think it's being done out of a perception that it is politically convenient to target vulnerable groups.

00:35:34.000 Honestly, I think where it largely comes from is folks who don't want to talk about why they were against the infrastructure law that's building the roads and bridges.

00:35:42.000 They don't want to talk about why they were against $35 insulin that the president delivered for Medicare recipients.

00:35:48.000 They don't want to explain why they were for these radical positions that speak to what most people are worried about in their everyday lives.

00:35:57.000 Yeah, you're right.

00:35:57.000 The radical positions are debates over the debt ceiling.

00:35:59.000 The radical position is not that boys can be girls and girls can be boys.

00:36:02.000 The radical position is that you think that taxes should be slightly lower and we shouldn't spend so much money.

00:36:07.000 Right.

00:36:07.000 Nailed it.

00:36:08.000 Again, it's an elite cadre of people in the media who are pushing this sort of stuff as well, which presumably is why Discovery Plus is now pushing the lie that Abraham Lincoln was gay.

00:36:15.000 They literally push this on Discovery Plus. 0.96

00:36:17.000 It's just nonsense. 1.00

00:36:18.000 It's garbage. 1.00

00:36:18.000 It's not true. 1.00

00:36:20.000 Y'all have probably heard about this guy, Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States.

00:36:27.000 He won the Civil War and landed his mug on the five dollar bill, all while being a total bearded daddy.

00:36:35.000 Mercy.

00:36:36.000 Lincoln was famous for having a way with words.

00:36:39.000 Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent A new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

00:36:53.000 But he also had a way with hot, young men.

00:36:58.000 Yes, darling, your history book has censored Lincoln's love life for far too long.

00:37:04.000 Truth is, Lincoln had at least four intimate and maybe even sexual relationships with men.

00:37:11.000 We like to call them Lincoln's Four Scores.

00:37:18.000 Discovery plus guys, um, that is a that that's a lie That's just a lie. 0.99

00:37:23.000 I mean historians have repeatedly debunked this crap. 0.98

00:37:25.000 It does not matter. 0.76

00:37:26.000 They're pushing it anyway They're pushing this on you and they're pushing this on your kids and they're pushing this on everybody and it turns out that there is in fact a backlash this and by the way, They don't even believe this the minute you think discovery plus is broadcasting this in China or in Saudi Of course, they're not of course, they're not it's And then you wonder why the reaction is happening.

00:37:45.000 That's why the reaction is happening, guys.

00:37:47.000 That would be why the reaction is happening.

00:37:50.000 Meanwhile, the militant LGBTQ plus movement has decided that federal judgeships can be used to their advantage. 0.59

00:37:58.000 So over in Florida, a federal judge has now temporarily blocked a Florida ban on puberty blockers for minors.

00:38:03.000 His name is Judge Robert Hinkle, and he issued a preliminary injunction against Senate Bill 254, which criminalizes permanently mutilating surgical procedures on children and mandates that a healthcare practitioner's license be terminated if they violate the law.

00:38:16.000 Hinkle wrote in his 44-page ruling, quote, the elephant in the room should be noted at the outset.

00:38:21.000 Gender identity is real.

00:38:23.000 The record makes this clear.

00:38:25.000 Oh, so he's, oh, he's an authoritative.

00:38:27.000 The science says, the law says, despite the defense admissions, there are those who believe that cisgender individuals properly adhere to their natal sex and that transgender individuals have inappropriately chosen a contrary gender identity, male or female, just as one might choose to read Shakespeare or Grisham, Hinkle continued.

00:38:42.000 He says, gender identity is so real, it's the realest of the real things, it's so real that he can strike down a popularly approved law in the state of Florida that prevents physicians from mutilating kids.

00:38:54.000 The plaintiff's adolescent children will suffer irreparable harm if they do not promptly begin treatment with gender-affirming healthcare.

00:39:02.000 The treatment will affect patients themselves.

00:39:04.000 Nobody else will cause the defendants no harm, says Hinkle.

00:39:07.000 Now again, this is not the first time this particular judge has decided to go to war with the rest of the state and also basic logic.

00:39:15.000 He was a nominee of Bill Clinton.

00:39:18.000 And this comes after, in August of 2020, he attempted to reinstate a George Soros-funded prosecutor who had been fired by Ron DeSantis.

00:39:28.000 This is also the same judge who dismantled portions of Florida's felon voting law, suggesting that felons had to vote.

00:39:37.000 He argued that nearly 775,000 felons with outstanding legal and financial obligations had to vote.

00:39:43.000 They had a right to vote.

00:39:45.000 So he's a far-left insane judge who did this.

00:39:48.000 Again, this is, it is a revolution from above.

00:39:50.000 This is not a revolution from below.

00:39:52.000 And people notice it.

00:39:53.000 And that's why the backlash is gonna be so harmful to the left if they continue along these lines.

00:39:58.000 Now, the revolution from above, as we've said, relies on the media.

00:40:01.000 Major changes are happening in the world of media.

00:40:04.000 CNN cannot find its way.

00:40:05.000 CNN is in serious, serious trouble.

00:40:07.000 Big news in media landscape today is that Chris Licht is out.

00:40:10.000 He was there for five seconds ago.

00:40:12.000 So he was tapped to run the network by David Zaslav like 16 months ago.

00:40:18.000 Licked had a reputation as a wonder-kind producer, according to Puck News, who could work with elite talent.

00:40:24.000 And he was aligned with John Malone's rich, older-guy, big-sky vision of recalibrating the network's politics to its centrist origins.

00:40:29.000 But Licked's CV consisted of programming a few hours of morning or late-night talk TV with two or three principles, not managing the entirety of the CNN network.

00:40:39.000 So after the Trump town hall and decimation of staff morale, Licht is now going to be vacating that CEO position.

00:40:47.000 Warner Brothers Discovery is going to announce that Licht will be stepping away.

00:40:50.000 He's going to be replaced for the interim period by apparently a person named Amy Entelis.

00:40:57.000 Amy Entelis is of course yet another member of the far left.

00:41:02.000 She is a producer on a wide variety of far left shows.

00:41:05.000 She launched the whole story with Anderson Cooper, for example.

00:41:09.000 She's credited with building the CNN original series brand.

00:41:12.000 So presumably they're going to try to steer back to the left, but it doesn't matter.

00:41:15.000 CNN is toast.

00:41:16.000 CNN is toast because largely cable news is in serious trouble.

00:41:19.000 And cable news is in serious trouble because younger and younger people don't even watch cable news.

00:41:23.000 Which is why the numbers from Tucker Carlson on Twitter are so astounding.

00:41:26.000 So Tucker Carlson, in the other big media news of the day, he brought back a version of his show on Twitter, calling it Tucker on Twitter.

00:41:34.000 It's like a 10 minute monologue.

00:41:36.000 A film direct to camera, one shot, in which he talks about the topics of the day.

00:41:40.000 Here's what Tucker sounded like yesterday.

00:41:42.000 The number of views is pretty insane.

00:41:44.000 Hey, it's Tucker Carlson.

00:41:46.000 This morning, it looks like somebody blew up the Kokovka Dam in southern Ukraine.

00:41:51.000 The rushing wall of water wiped out entire villages, destroyed a critical hydropower plant, and as of tonight, puts the largest nuclear reactor in Europe in danger of melting down.

00:42:03.000 So, if this was intentional, it was not a military tactic, it was an act of terrorism.

00:42:10.000 Tucker is back and the numbers are huge.

00:42:12.000 The numbers are very large.

00:42:15.000 64.8 million views as of earlier this morning.

00:42:19.000 So those are big numbers.

00:42:21.000 Now, again, it's hard to measure exactly what these views look like.

00:42:23.000 We've been trying to figure it out with What Is A Woman as well. 1.00

00:42:26.000 A view on Twitter video, very often within 14, 15 seconds, people have tuned out.

00:42:30.000 But it also happens to be the case that a lot of people will tune out of network news on a nightly basis.

00:42:35.000 So those are very, very large numbers for Tucker.

00:42:38.000 And I would assume that as cable news continues to struggle with finding new audiences, people like Tucker are going to continue to do very well in the online space.

00:42:49.000 Part of that, obviously, is also the botchery of the media.

00:42:51.000 Again, the media are the promulgators of the great myths among us.

00:42:54.000 They lie on a routine basis, and so that means that alternative voices are having those voices heard.

00:42:58.000 It's why the numbers for this show are so large.

00:43:00.000 It's why Joe Rogan's numbers are so large.

00:43:01.000 It's why Tucker's numbers are so large.

00:43:02.000 The depositing of alternative sources of information is going to be the wave of the future, and that's why, by the way, again, thanks to Elon Musk, Twitter is a free place to be, and we need more of that in social media.

00:43:15.000 Meanwhile, in the presidential race, we are seeing some movement in the polls.

00:43:18.000 There's a brand new poll out from Iowa.

00:43:20.000 Now, remember, all of the national polling is going to favor Donald Trump for the foreseeable future because, of course, Donald Trump is the most famous person in the race.

00:43:27.000 He is the ex-president of the United States and maybe the most famous person on planet Earth at this point.

00:43:33.000 However, the state-level polls are going to be the polls that actually tell the tale.

00:43:38.000 And so, I'm looking right now at the latest polls from Iowa.

00:43:42.000 And what you see is that in Iowa, the gap is now being closed pretty significantly by DeSantis.

00:43:48.000 There is a breaking poll out of Iowa that shows DeSantis closing the gap by 14 percentage points.

00:43:54.000 A new Never Back Down PAC survey shared with Axios has DeSantis closing the gap In mid-May, before DeSantis officially announced, he earned a 24% number in Iowa compared to Trump's 48%, that's 24 point gap.

00:44:07.000 A few weeks later, after launching his campaign May 24th, the Florida governor is up to 29% among likely Iowa caucus goers against Trump's 39%.

00:44:14.000 And that's after being in the race for like five minutes.

00:44:17.000 That is a pretty significant closing gap right there.

00:44:22.000 There is a poll out of Virginia and that poll also shows Trump up, but he's up 48-28.

00:44:27.000 Meanwhile, you have Pence earning seven, Haley earning seven. 0.90

00:44:32.000 There are a bunch of other candidates in that race.

00:44:34.000 When it comes down to a two-person race, this looks very, very competitive, suddenly.

00:44:39.000 So, sort of fascinating to watch as the race starts to close up just a little bit.

00:44:44.000 Would not be surprised if it closes significantly further, because again, we're in the very early days.

00:44:48.000 Meanwhile, Chris Christie is out there being very aggressive with Trump, which will last precisely as long as Chris Christie thinks that Trump will not pick him for a running mate.

00:44:56.000 Trump himself is very happy with Christie being in the race.

00:44:58.000 He basically said, good luck, Chris.

00:45:00.000 The thing about Trump that everybody loves, and I admit, I enjoy it as well, is that Trump is entirely transparent.

00:45:05.000 It's not like he's hiding the ball.

00:45:07.000 He's openly rooting for candidates who are not DeSantis.

00:45:09.000 Tim Scott enters, he's like, congratulations to Tim and welcome to the race.

00:45:13.000 Christie enters, and he's like, Chris Christie will eat Ron DeSantis' lunch.

00:45:17.000 That's literally what he put out.

00:45:18.000 He put out a truth social saying that Christie is going to eat Ron DeSantis' lunch.

00:45:21.000 Left unspoken is the fact that Chris Christie will eat everyone's lunch.

00:45:25.000 In fact, any lunch, anywhere, is subject to the gravitational pull of Chris Christie.

00:45:31.000 Christie is going hard at Trump right now, but Trump doesn't care because he knows that he can't do him any damage.

00:45:34.000 After all, Trump is the person who was bossing Chris Christie around and telling him to get back on the plane five minutes ago.

00:45:42.000 The CNN anchors are going after Ron DeSantis with Alacrity.

00:45:46.000 What is their latest bombshell report?

00:45:48.000 Their latest bombshell report is that apparently Ron DeSantis once had dinner with Clarence Thomas.

00:45:52.000 I know.

00:45:52.000 Shocking news from CNN.

00:45:55.000 Here is a little bit of their report.

00:45:58.000 Because I do think he is our greatest living justice.

00:46:02.000 Thank you.

00:46:07.000 And after that speech, DeSantis, Thomas, and Leo all went out to dinner.

00:46:10.000 CNN Senior Supreme Court Analyst Joan Biskupic has much more on this.

00:46:16.000 I'm sorry, Joan.

00:46:17.000 What do you see in this, Joan?

00:46:21.000 Yeah.

00:46:22.000 Morning, Kate.

00:46:23.000 Didn't you like that big bear hug at the end there?

00:46:25.000 That event was part of the roots of this very tight relationship between Ron DeSantis, Leonard Leo, and Clarence Thomas.

00:46:32.000 All have many things in common, and they all focus on the judiciary.

00:46:36.000 And Ron DeSantis, now as a candidate, is taking a page from the Donald Trump playbook and running on the Supreme Court.

00:46:43.000 And he's doing it in part by holding up Clarence Thomas as a model.

00:46:49.000 Oh, wow, that's shocking news there from CNN.

00:46:52.000 You mean Republicans like Clarence Thomas?

00:46:54.000 Wow.

00:46:55.000 In other news, Rosie O'Donnell, not straight.

00:46:58.000 Breaking news, guys.

00:47:00.000 I know, it's shocking.

00:47:00.000 Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.

00:47:03.000 So, things that I like today.

00:47:05.000 There are a lot of people out there who are very alarmist about AI.

00:47:08.000 I've talked about what I think the threats to AI could be, where the jobs of the future are going to be.

00:47:12.000 But a person who's really thought this through in a deep and profound way is Marc Andreessen.

00:47:16.000 He has a phenomenal piece over at his Substack that is totally worth reading.

00:47:22.000 He is the co-author of Mosaic, which was the first widely used web browser, and he was the co-founder of Netscape, and now he runs a venture capital firm called Andreessen Horowitz, and he goes through why he thinks AI will save the world.

00:47:32.000 It's a tech optimist piece, and it's a very convincing piece about the upsides of AI.

00:47:39.000 What he says, essentially, is that AI augmentation of human intelligence has already started, which will be a good thing because we will be able to do more things.

00:47:47.000 He says, AI offers us the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence and many others, from the creation of new medicines, to ways to solve climate change, to technologies to reach the stars, much, much better from here.

00:48:00.000 The point that Andreessen makes is that very often people think of AI like, it's a machine, we're a machine, so it's a machine that's better than we are, so we lose.

00:48:10.000 And the point Andreessen makes is, we don't fully understand what makes people human or not human.

00:48:16.000 He suggests, That very often the ways that we define what it means to be a human could equally apply to simple machines.

00:48:24.000 Goal-directed, adjusting to the environment, unhappy when goal is not reached, and then attempting to find that goal.

00:48:31.000 And as Mark has said, that refers to a thermostat, right?

00:48:35.000 It's attempting to find 72 degrees, and it's unhappy when it doesn't have that goal.

00:48:39.000 It has a feedback mechanism to attempt to achieve that goal.

00:48:42.000 Is that how the human brain works?

00:48:43.000 Is that what it is to be human?

00:48:45.000 Obviously not.

00:48:46.000 So there's something that we can't explain about being human that makes us different from AI.

00:48:51.000 And AI is just a really, really good machine.

00:48:54.000 He says, in our new era of AI, every child will have an AI tutor

00:48:56.000 that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful.

00:49:01.000 The AI tutor will be by each child's side every step of their development,

00:49:05.000 helping them maximize their potential.

00:49:06.000 Every person will have an AI assistant, coach, mentor, trainer, advisor, or therapist,

00:49:10.000 infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful.

00:49:14.000 Every scientist will have an AI assistant.

00:49:15.000 Every leader of the people will have the same.

00:49:17.000 Productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth.

00:49:24.000 And this is sort of the point.

00:49:25.000 He says that there are a lot of people who are panicking right now.

00:49:29.000 He says those kind of break down into two categories.

00:49:30.000 There are the people who are true believers that AI is going to ruin everything.

00:49:35.000 And they're alarmist about it.

00:49:36.000 And then there are what he calls bootleggers, self-interested opportunists who stand to financially profit by the imposition of new restrictions, regulations, and laws that insulate them from competitors.

00:49:46.000 So presumably that would be big corporations that are involving themselves in AI regulation right now to kill all of their competition off.

00:49:51.000 And then he talks about the various risks.

00:49:52.000 He says, will AI kill us all?

00:49:55.000 He says that this is absurd.

00:49:58.000 He says, my view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error.

00:50:03.000 AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are and as we are.

00:50:10.000 It is math, built by people, owned by people, used by people and controlled by people.

00:50:13.000 In short, AI does not want, does not have goals.

00:50:15.000 It does not want to kill you because it is not alive.

00:50:18.000 It's not going to come alive and kill you any more than your toaster will.

00:50:21.000 Now, there are people who can use AI to do bad things, for sure.

00:50:25.000 But the idea that it's just going to become self-aware and then kill all of humanity is nonsense.

00:50:29.000 The second question that he takes on is, will AI ruin our society?

00:50:33.000 He says, no.

00:50:36.000 He says it's not going to be AI generating hate speech and misinformation that's the problem.

00:50:40.000 It's going to be people who attempt to censor other people who are the problem, which of course is true.

00:50:44.000 The third risk, which is the one that people are concerned about, like Andrew Yang, who are pushing universal basic income, is that AI is going to take all of our jobs.

00:50:51.000 He says this is mistaken.

00:50:53.000 He says we have technology that is going to advance humanity.

00:50:57.000 He says AI, if allowed to develop and proliferate throughout the economy, may cause the most dramatic and sustained economic boom of all time, with correspondingly record job and wage growth, the exact opposite of the fear.

00:51:07.000 Here's why.

00:51:08.000 The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs-doomers keep making is called the lump-of-labor fallacy.

00:51:12.000 This fallacy is basically there's a fixed pie of labor and that if machines take more, human beings take less.

00:51:17.000 But it's not true.

00:51:18.000 When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth, an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs.

00:51:23.000 A human using a computer is way more productive than a human not using a computer.

00:51:27.000 The result is lower prices for goods and services.

00:51:30.000 As the prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things, which increases demand in the economy.

00:51:37.000 And then people invest that money, and they produce new things.

00:51:41.000 The result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs.

00:51:45.000 You also get higher wages because, at the level of the individual worker, the marketplace sets compensation as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker.

00:51:52.000 A worker in a tech-infused business will be more productive than a worker in a non-tech-infused business.

00:51:57.000 This is why, if you are working in an air-conditioned office, there's a good shot that you're making more money than a person who is working, like, basic agriculture somewhere.

00:52:04.000 The employer will either pay that worker more money because he's now more productive, or another employer will.

00:52:09.000 Technology introduced into an industry generally increases the number of jobs and also raises wages.

00:52:16.000 As far as technology that replaces literally all human labor, which is what people are worried about...

00:52:21.000 Which would mean literally all existing human labor being replaced by machines.

00:52:24.000 That would mean a take-off rate of economic productivity growth that would be absolutely stratospheric, beyond any historical precedent.

00:52:30.000 Prices of existing goods and services would drop across the board to virtually zero.

00:52:33.000 Consumer welfare would skyrocket.

00:52:35.000 Consumer spending power would skyrocket.

00:52:36.000 New demand in the economy would explode.

00:52:38.000 Which would mean that human beings would create new stuff.

00:52:42.000 And if AI replaces that labor, then the cycle would repeat.

00:52:45.000 So, I think it's a very convincing piece by Marc Andreessen.

00:52:48.000 You should go check it out right now over at his substack.

00:52:51.000 It is definitely worth the read.

00:52:52.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.

00:52:54.000 Okay, so everybody's going nuts over this report about UFOs.

00:53:01.000 Uh, meh.

00:53:02.000 My reaction is meh.

00:53:04.000 According to the UK Guardian, the U.S.

00:53:06.000 has been urged to disclose evidence of UFOs after a whistleblower, former intelligence official, said the government has possession of intact and partially intact alien vehicles.

00:53:13.000 The former intelligence officer is named David Grush.

00:53:15.000 He led analysis of unexplained anomalous phenomenon within a U.S.

00:53:18.000 Department of Defense agency, and he has alleged the U.S.

00:53:20.000 has graft of non-human origin illegally being withheld from Congress.

00:53:24.000 So we now have a single source who left the government in April after a 14-year career in U.S.

00:53:28.000 intelligence saying that there are aliens out there and we have control over their

00:53:34.000 spacecraft.

00:53:34.000 Jonathan Gray, current US intelligence official at NASA, confirmed the existence of exotic materials to the debrief,

00:53:40.000 adding, We are not alone.

00:53:41.000 Color me doubtful.

00:53:44.000 Color me doubtful.

00:53:45.000 Mainly because I don't tend to believe that secrets stay secrets in the U.S.

00:53:48.000 government.

00:53:49.000 Everybody is very leaky over there.

00:53:52.000 And do you really believe that, here's a real question, do you believe that intelligent alien life, which is presumably what we're talking about, flew millions of light years to arrive here on planet Earth, and then proceeded to fly around until it fell down and was found by American military forces?

00:54:10.000 Or by the U.S.

00:54:11.000 government?

00:54:11.000 I mean, the U.S.

00:54:12.000 government can't tie its own shoelaces. 0.84

00:54:14.000 I have serious competence doubts about this.

00:54:15.000 So people who are like, we now have proof!

00:54:17.000 It's the biggest story in the world.

00:54:19.000 When you show me the spacecraft, and you show me where it's from, and you give me some evidence other than a dude saying it, who's now going to be very famous and being able to write books, then I have... Until you show me that, I have doubts.

00:54:30.000 Alrighty guys, the rest of the show continues right now.

00:54:32.000 You're not going to want to miss it.

00:54:32.000 We'll be joined online by presidential candidate Nikki Haley.

00:54:34.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

00:54:35.000 Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - June 07, 2023

Who Blew Up The Ukrainian Dam?? Someone's Lying

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