Ep. 1988 - Bring BACK The Ten Commandments in Schools
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One of the great lies that is told by the international left, particularly the American left, is the idea that if you have no religion, if you are an atheist, if you are somebody who is in the post-Christian world, well, that really means that you have an alternative ideology called secularism. And the secularism is, in fact, not a form of religion. It's a form of reason.

and logic. That's not true. It just simply is not true. There are a wide variety of belief systems across the world, and one of them is in fact secularism. And secularism has turned into a weird version of paganism in which nature is to be worshipped. One of the ways that you see that is in protesters against the climate, against the heating up of the world, which again, some of that is anthropogenic, meaning human cause. Some of it is probably not.

Well, these protesters believe that they are going to make the world a better place by destroying or defacing monuments, whether it is the Mona Lisa or whether it's the Eiffel Tower or now whether it is Stonehenge. So yesterday, environmental protesters decided it would be an amazing idea to go and spray paint Stonehenge in order to demonstrate that oil is bad. So they are deploying sprays.

all sorts of chemicals into the air in order to show that it is bad to deploy carbon into the air. The group posted on X, quote, the Just Stop Oil protesters demanded the incoming government sign up to a legally binding treaty to phase out fossil fuels by 2030 because you can magically declare that alternative sources of energy are not going to impoverish the world and make people sicker, poorer, and live...

a shorter amount of time if you just spray paint on an ancient historical site, an ancient pagan historical site. There's a sort of weird resonance here from paganism to paganism to a few thousand year jaunt into Judeo-Christianity. And now we've apparently moved beyond that into a different form of religion. That's what happened yesterday at Stonehenge. Here's some film of the just stop oil protesters damaging Stonehenge in the name of the climate. Okay.

Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop

And then one of the Just Stop Oil protesters explains precisely why they are doing this incredibly stupid thing. My name is Niamh. I'm 21 and I'm a student at the University of Oxford. Today, I'm taking action with Just Stop Oil to demand that the UK government commits to signing the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and promises to stop burning fossil fuels by 2030. To refuse to do so is to warrant death.

death, destruction and suffering on an absolutely immense and immeasurable scale. Today we'll be taking action at Stonehenge the day before the solstice. For thousands of years people have come to Stonehenge on the solstice to celebrate our natural world, to celebrate the beauty of our natural world. But I can't help thinking what does it look like today and what the heck have we done to it? These stones have stood here for 5,000 years

What will the world look like in 5,000 years time? What will our legacy be? Becoming ever more clear that we end the fossil fuel era or the fossil fuel era ends us. Well, the new religion here obviously involves defacing monuments. It also involves gender non-binariness.

And it's this sort of Gnostic religion that exists out there. The reason I point this out is not because I think that it is wildly important that these morons keep gluing themselves to walls and floors and paintings and streets and all the rest of this stuff. I think that actually they're doing their cause a great disservice because it turns out most people object to watching historic objects defaced. The reason I point this out is because the great lie that I talked about

a couple of minutes ago, this great lie that secularism is not its own form of religion is a lie that has been telescoped into American law. This comes up today because the Louisiana governor has now declared that he is going to put the Ten Commandments back in schools and the left is losing its absolute mind. According to the Associated Press,

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom. It's the latest move from a GOP-dominated legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor, which is usually what happens when you have, you know, Republicans in the legislature and also Republicans as the governors usually get a more conservative agenda. The legislation signed by Republican Governor Jeff Landry into law on Wednesday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in large, easily readable fonts in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.

Landry said, if you want to respect the rule of law, you've got to start from the original lawgiver, who is Moses, who got the commandments from God. Opponents naturally jumped into action, suggesting that this was wildly unconstitutional. Under the law, state funds will not be used to implement the mandate. The posters will be paid for through donations. So it's not state money. It's just going to say that there has to be a display there. It also authorizes but does not require the display of other items in K-12 public schools, including the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Northwest Ordinance,

Well, very quickly, the ACLU, which is a trash organization, they used to stand for free speech. Now they just stand for radical leftism. They immediately announced this was unconstitutional and they were going to stand up to it.

CNN's Eli Honig, who is one of their legal analysts, he says this is clearly unconstitutional. We'll explain why he's wrong in just a moment and why it matters. But this is actually the size. This is 11 by 14. This is what actually the size that has to be printed. Obviously, clearly legible. You can read this. And it's just notable that this is what they're saying has to be in each classroom. But my first question was, you know, is requiring this regardless of size, right?

Does it violate the First Amendment? Yes, flagrantly, in my view. If you wanted a perfect example of what the First Amendment prohibits, I think this is it. The First Amendment says Congress, government, shall make no while respecting establishment of religion, meaning state entities can't do things that

endorse any particular religion or religiosity in general. And if you look at those 10, there are some... I know one of the defenses is, well, these are themes that are consistent throughout civilized society and throughout religion. Shall not kill, number six. I'm cheating because I'm looking. But, you know, don't kill, don't rob, don't steal, that kind of thing. But there are some commandments that are inherently religious

religious, observe the Sabbath day. I'm the only God that you may worship. So it's an inherently religious document. I should add, this came up before. In 1980, there was a case out of Kentucky in the Supreme Court, almost the exact same facts, and the Supreme Court said unconstitutional. - Okay, so here is the problem with this particular argument. We'll get more on this in just a moment. First, Saudi Arabia recently ended its 50-year petrodollar deal with the United States,

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In just one second, we'll get to more. First, your God-given freedoms are, in fact, under threat. Your elected officials who have sworn to defend your freedom, well, we know they can't be trusted. They think they can violate your right to protect your family and force their delusions onto your kids. But you know what they can't take away is self-reliance and peace of mind. So equip yourself for anything with emergency items like water filtration, a charged solar generator,

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What I mean by that is that it is not the French Republic. This is a point that was made by Justice Scalia in a dissent in 2005 case in which the Constitution of France says France is a secular republic in which religion is to be excluded generally from the public forum.

That is not the United States of America. The First Amendment was designed to guarantee the practice of religion against the federal government. So just to do the history of the First Amendment very quickly here, this idea that there is a separating wall between church and state in the sense that religion is never supposed to impact people's values and how they vote or religion can never be promoted in the public square or in fact, religion generally can never be promoted against irreligion generally by the government. That is also untrue.

There's no historical basis for this. The First Amendment specifically says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Number one, this was never supposed to originally be implemented in the states. It took all the way until the 1940s for the Supreme Court to declare that this was now going to be applied at the state level. It's one of the weirdnesses of constitutional law. The first rule is stop looking at the Constitution when you do constitutional law, because the Bill of Rights is specifically applicable to the federal government, not to the state government. In fact...

Nine of the 13 colonies had established churches at the time of the Revolutionary War. Connecticut maintained its congregationalist church like a state-sponsored church until 1818. New Hampshire until 1819. Massachusetts until 1833. So well past the establishment of the First Amendment, there were states in the United States that had established religions.

Why? Because, again, the goal here was to stop the federal government from establishing its own generalized religion that would prohibit people at the state level from having their own religions. The idea that secularism was supposed to predominate in the United States is obviously untrue, and none of the founders believed that. Even the founders who tended toward atheism.

tended to believe that religion had an extraordinarily positive effect on the body politic. And so the promotion of religion generally was considered a good thing by the founding fathers. As President John Adams wrote a letter to the Massachusetts militia, quote, we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution was made only from moral and religious people.

George Washington said in his first inaugural address, quote, the foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality. There exists in the economy and course of nature in an insoluble union between virtue and happiness. Even James Madison, who wrote the non-establishment clause of the Virginia state constitution, for example, he did so because he thought he was strengthening religion. He thought that if you established a religion in Virginia, it would prohibit the flowering of religion in the private sphere.

Thomas Jefferson, the guy who everyone talks about in terms of coining the phrase separation between church and state, recognized, quote, the moral branch of religion instructs us how to live well and worthily in society. Now, what the courts have done or had done for the last several decades is something that is completely unprecedented and stupid. They have read the establishment clause and the free exercise clause as in opposition to one another.

Remember, the Constitution says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. There are two ways to read that. And the Supreme Court has read this in the dumbest possible way. One is that Congress shall not prohibit you from freely exercising a religion. And the second is Congress shall not establish any religion. And it has read them completely separately.

And what that's done is it has put them in conflict with one another, because it turns out that if you express your religion freely in the public square, then the Supreme Court might say you're violating the Establishment Clause. But that's never how this provision was meant to be read. They were meant to be read in tandem. The basic idea was you can't establish, say, Catholicism as the official religion of the United States, because in doing so, you will quash the free exercise of people of other religions via compulsion.

That is what the Constitution was designed to prohibit was compulsion in religion. Well, there's nothing compulsory about a sign on a classroom wall. If there was something compulsory about a sign on a classroom wall, there'd be all sorts of serious free speech issues in a classroom because it turns out classroom walls are filled with all sorts of stuff that's on the walls. Is it violating my free speech?

If somebody puts up on the wall a sign that says something I disagree with, I'm not sure how that violates my free speech. But the same argument is made about religion, that if I walk into a public school and there is a sign that quotes the Bible in a non-denominational way, by the way, because it turns out that the three major religions, traditionally Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all agree that the Ten Commandments were given to Moses and they agree on the content of the Ten Commandments.

So in 1971, the Supreme Court took up a case called Lemon v. Kurtzman, and they came up with an incredibly stupid test to determine whether some sort of government action violated the separation of church and state. They said that any law had fulfilled three conditions. One, it had to have a secular purpose. Two, it had to have a predominantly secular effect. And three, it had to not foster excessive entanglement between government and religion. Now, when you read that, that is on its face nonsensical. It basically doesn't set any standard at all.

Because I can make an argument for virtually any religious display that it both violates the Lemon Test and also does not violate the Lemon Test. In 1980, the Supreme Court, this is the case that Eli Honig was referring to, in a case called Stone v. Graham, there was a law that required the classroom display of the Ten Commandments. And the Supreme Court found that it was unconstitutional because it had no secular legislative purpose.

They said the Ten Commandments convey a religious undertone because they include the religious duties of believers, worshiping the Lord God alone, avoiding idolatry, not using the Lord's name in vain, observing the Sabbath day. But again, that is based on a fundamental misreading that, again, is enshrined in Lemon, that the government of the United States has to take no position between religion and irreligion, that the government of the United States has no, none interest in promoting public morality via generalized religion.

That the government has to be absolutely agnostic about whether it is promoting the Ten Commandments or whether it is promoting just stop oil. That these are paganism, Judeo-Christian religion, the Ten Commandments, all these things.

are of a piece, according to the Supreme Court from 1971 on.

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In 2005, there's a case that's very similar about a public display of the Ten Commandments and Justice Scalia dissents in this case. And here's what he writes. What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolute indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle.

He, by the way, is ripping the lemon test here. He's saying there's no consistently applied principle. Besides appealing to the demonstrably false principle that government cannot favor religion over irreligion, today's opinion suggests the posting of the Ten Commandments violates the principle that the government cannot favor one religion over another.

If religion in the public forum had to be entirely non-denominational, there could be no religion in the public forum at all. One cannot say the word God or the Almighty. One cannot offer public supplication or thanksgiving without contradicting the beliefs of some people that there are many gods or that God and the gods pay no attention to human affairs. With respect to public acknowledgement of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.

In other words, every time Joe Biden finishes his speech and says, God bless our troops, why isn't that an establishment of religion? In the same way, it would theoretically be an establishment of religion to put the Ten Commandments on a public school classroom. And the answer is because it's not establishing religion. Joe Biden isn't forcing you to do anything, and neither is the sign on the public school classroom. It is encouraging you to abide by the central fundamental moral premises of the West.

The attempt to remove the Ten Commandments says more about the society than the attempt to replace them. All of Western civilization is based on a merger of Judeo-Christian ethics, found in the Old and the New Testaments, and Greek reason. Well, in our modern society, we've decided to basically call all of those things dispensable. We're just going to get rid of all of them, and that's why you end up with morons who are spray-painting orange on the Stonehenge Monument.

That is why they're doing that. Because it turns out that when you move into a post-reason and also post-religious society, religion and reason, by the way, for most of human history, were thought to bolster one another. Because as it turns out, there is no basis in evolutionary biology for the notion that there is this thing called right reason that ends in actual, factual, truthful statements like capital T truth, independent of your mind. That is a fundamental faith principle.

And it is necessary in order to pursue things like science and reason. This is why everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Maimonides believed that there was a consonance between faith principles and rationality. But first society decided to divide those two things to say that there was faith principle and that was irrationality. And then there were reasonable principles and that was reason. And then they decided to dispense with both of those because it turns out that without the grounding of particular faith principles, reason collapses in on itself.

Because you simply cannot make, it is not possible to make a case for the idea of secular reason and logic absent certain basic premises. Not my argument, it's an argument made by a philosopher and mathematician named Alvin Platinga. That the sort of fundamental argument in favor of human reason is that your brain is capable of grasping higher truths

But what in the meat package that is your brain allows it to grasp something called truth rather than something called adaptability, like whatever makes you survive. It is that move from the adaptive to the true that is something that cannot be bridged without a fundamental faith assumption. In any case, as it turns out, a society that takes down the Ten Commandments tends to be a society that does not obey the Ten Commandments and does not believe that the Ten Commandments are important. And it turns out the Ten Commandments are really, really important.

Not because secular societies, meaning non-Judeo-Christian religious societies, are going to involve themselves in murder necessarily, or that people will simply decide that without a sign on the wall saying, thou shalt not kill, that is totally fine to kill. But it's the idea that without an absolute moral arbiter sitting at the top of the hierarchy, you can call that arbiter God, that that becomes a matter of argument. The whole point of having a sort of higher morality that is non-appealable, there is no debate about it,

is precisely that. And once you start having debates about the rightness or wrongness of killing, you end up in some pretty dicey moral territory pretty quickly.

And on a sort of constitutional level, this is why the Constitution was written in order to enshrine certain principles and put them beyond the realm of debate. It's why you have to have a supermajority in order to change the Constitution, for example. When it comes to godly commandments, even from a secular point of view, let's say that you're a total atheist and you believe that there is no God. Why might you believe that the Ten Commandments are important? Because it takes certain fundamental principles and puts them beyond the scope of debate.

And it's pretty good that those are beyond the scope of debate. You don't want to live in a society where thou shalt not kill is not beyond the scope of debate, where that really is like a debatable proposition or thou shalt not commit adultery. It turns out that that one has been put to the test in the United States and it's ended pretty poorly. Actually, it turns out that many of the central principles of the Ten Commandments have been put to the test in the United States since we've decided not to obey them. And it's ended really, really poorly for the United States and for Western civilization in general.

I think it's almost, not almost, it is completely inarguable that a society that abides by the Ten Commandments is going to be better than a society that does not. How about honor thy parents? We're now a society that does not honor our parents. We're a society that scorns our parents as racists and bigots and white supremacists and vestiges of the past. Has that made our society better or worse? How about do not bear false witness?

We live in a society now in which you are totally allowed to bear false witness so long as the political motivations of the person against whom you are bearing the false witness are suspect. Has that made the society better or worse? How about the 10th commandment? Do not covet other people's possessions. We live in a society that's totally done away with that in which covetousness is now seen as an actual political program. Bernie Sanders's new party, if he ever decided to start one, should be called the covetousness party.

Because that's all he does, just covets other people's stuff, believing that it is his own.

It turns out that a society has to have a centralizing philosophy. The centralizing philosophy of the United States used to be grounded in Judeo-Christian virtue. That is why it is good to put the Ten Commandments back up on the wall. Not that everybody's going to start abiding by them, but to remind people that, in fact, a functional society has to have a functional philosophy. And the most functional philosophy over the last several thousand years has sprung from those Ten Commandments. And there is nothing wrong with that constitutionally. There's nothing wrong with that legally. It is a very, very good thing.

And again, no one's being forced to pray in the classroom. In fact, even when prayer in the classroom was a thing, no one was being forced to pray in the classroom. You were allowed to sit it out, for example. But beyond all of that, it turns out that a functional society understands that freedom exists because of the virtue upon which it sits and within the confines of the virtuous institutions that also exist.

We're a society that's basically decided that freedom can destroy everything else around. It can be used as a sort of universal acid to get rid of virtue. And then it turns out freedom without virtue is just vice. And that's effectively what we have seen in the United States of America. So good for the governor of Louisiana. I have a feeling the Supreme Court is going to uphold this this time, mainly because, again, in 2022, Justice Gorsuch correctly pointed out that Lemon was unworkable. He said that it creates, quote, a vice between the establishment clause on one side and the free speech and free exercise clauses on the other, which is a point that I made a little bit earlier.

And he is right about all of that. So I think the United States will be a better place for having displays like this in public places. It turns out that having displays about innate Judeo-Christian morality in public places in a non-denominational fashion is a pretty good thing.

And meanwhile, Joe Biden is running an election campaign that at the very best is dicey. There's a new Fox News poll out. It shows that Joe Biden is up 50 to 48 on Donald Trump. That's the first lead in the Fox News poll in quite a while. It's still well within the margin of error. And if this is a margin of error election, it doesn't look like that's going to go particularly well for Joe Biden. But it is a reminder to Republicans, this thing is not a cakewalk by any stretch of the imagination. I think there are a lot of Republicans out there who, because Trump is outperforming his polling data in 2020,

And because the 2020 election was really, really close, he ended up losing by about 7 million popular votes. But he ended up losing in the Electoral College by a grand total of like 43,000 votes spread over a few different states. Well, it's still a really, really close election. Everything is margin of error. So don't be fooled. If you're a Republican, don't be fooled into complacency about this election. Joe Biden has decided that he is going to run the Barack Obama 2012 strategy.

The Barack Obama 2012 strategy is present a bunch of give outs to particular constituency groups and claim that your opponent is pure, unbridled, malicious evil. The fact that it worked in 2012 against Mitt Romney, who, again, is like the most milquetoast human being on planet Earth, is one of the great amazements of politics I've talked about before. But that is, in fact, the Joe Biden strategy right now. Again, just repeat the polls.

The polls as of today in the RealCorp Politics polling average show Donald Trump up about five points in Arizona, more than five points in Nevada, which is just a blowout in Nevada. He's dead even in Wisconsin. He's dead even in Michigan. He's up a couple of points in Pennsylvania. He's up about five points in North Carolina. He's up about five points in Georgia. So again, those are good numbers for Trump, but they are not by any stretch of the imagination. He's going to wall up Joe Biden numbers.

So Joe Biden's strategy apparently is to, again, just pursue give outs and handouts no matter what that does for the broader body politic. So, in other words, concentrated benefits for particular groups that Joe Biden needs in order to win and diffuse costs across the population, except sometimes those costs are not so diffuse. As, for example, in the case of the murder of a Maryland mother named Rachel Moran.

According to CNN, a months-long investigation into the 2023 murder of a Maryland mother has led to the arrest of a 23-year-old man, according to local authorities. Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez, a citizen of El Salvador, was arrested at a bar in Tulsa, Oklahoma, according to the Tulsa Police Department. The suspect lied about his true identity, denied any knowledge of the crimes for which he is wanted,

When they ran his information, the authorities, they found he was wanted in connection with a rape and murder in Maryland. He faces charges of first-degree rape and first-degree murder in that case. But as it turns out, he is suspected of multiple crimes since he illegally crossed the border into the United States in February 2023. One of those crimes is the rape and murder of Rachel Morin, who was killed along a hiking trail in Bel Air in August of 2023. Apparently, Rachel was not his first victim. And according to the police...

This person fled to the United States illegally after committing a brutal murder of a young woman in El Salvador a month earlier in January. So how exactly did this person get into the country? That has not been made clear at this point. Did you show up at the border and claim asylum and they let him right in? Did he cross between points of entry? Unclear at this point. Alejandro Mayorkas of the Department of Homeland Security denied culpability in the rape and murder of Rachel Morin. Here he was.

What do you say to critics who blame the administration for allowing something like this to happen? Obviously, this is something that you hear in right wing media all the time. Jim, first and foremost, of course, our hearts break for the children, the family, the loved ones, the friends of the individual who was murdered, the woman, the mother. Jim, a criminal.

is responsible for the criminal act. The criminal who committed this heinous act should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law and forcefully so. That is my response.

So his response is the criminal is responsible. Yes. But who opened the door to the criminal, Alejandro? Who let him in the country? That's the entire question here, especially as Joe Biden now pursues a mass amnesty. This podcast is sponsored by IQ Bar. I've got good news and bad news. Here's the bad news. Most protein bars are packed with sugar and unpronounceable ingredients. The good news, there's a better option. I'm Will and I created IQ Bar plant protein bars.

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According to the Wall Street Journal editorial board, cynicism, thy new name is immigration politics. And President Biden is proving it again with his Tuesday announcement he will bestow legal status on the undocumented spouses and children of U.S. citizens. The order might be illegal. It could be reversed by a new president next year. It will further poison the immigration debate. But hey, any port in an election year storm. The plan offers a new path to citizenship for an estimated half million migrants who entered the country illegally but are now married to U.S. citizens.

The Department of Homeland Security says this will apply to anyone who has lived in the country for 10 years as of Monday, is married to an American and poses no security or criminal threat. Some 50,000 children of these spouses will also be eligible for citizenship. So as the Wall Street Journal points out,

This order is legally uncertain. Am I boomerang on spouses who apply for legal status? Biden is asserting an authority known as parole in place, which allows DHS to let illegal immigrants remain in the United States while they apply for citizenship. The statute specifies it can only be prescribed on a case by case basis for urgent humanitarian or significant public reasons. The administration says it allows a blanket parole. So he is effectively now daring the Republicans to basically try to deport these people.

That is the goal, according to Politico, like openly the goal of the Biden administration. This is all just bait. According to Politico, Joe Biden on Tuesday unveiled major new actions, but in issuing a new policy granting legal protections to undocumented spouses, the president was trying to lure Donald Trump into a very specific debate, too. Inside Biden's team, advisers are betting that the new policies unveiled at the White House on Tuesday will reignite a larger conversation about one of the most controversial chapters of the Trump era, the separation of families on the southern border. Now,

As you recall, it was Barack Obama who originally put the kids in cages. It turns out that under the floor as a settlement, families cannot be held together in custody. So children are generally released into the interior of the United States to a family member. Maybe we hope. And then the parents are kept in custody if they immigrate illegally. Now, Joe Biden is attempting to dare Trump to get into this. The problem for Joe Biden is I'm not sure this is a political winner.

I mean, the reality is that most Americans are just not all that interested in Joe Biden's sympathy first approach to illegal immigration. Joe Biden advisor Tom Perez, he says this immigration policy is incredibly smart. Of course, of course. What makes the White House confident that this plan is going to survive legal scrutiny and actually go into effect later this summer when so many other immigration plans from Trump, from Obama have been struck down by the courts?

Well, I think it's the right thing to do. It's the legal thing to do. And it's the smart thing to do. What the president did two weeks ago was to secure the border because we have to both secure the border and provide lawful pathways. That's what a balanced approach is all about.

Well, I mean, a balanced approach would involve closing the border, which is the thing that you are not, in fact, doing. You can tell how radical this program is by who is backing it. Pramila Jayapal, who's the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a far left radical. She says this is the biggest thing that we've seen in the United States since DACA. Not shockingly, DACA also happened to happen in the middle of the 2012 election.

This is huge. Talk about how President Biden got from that previous executive order, which a lot of immigration advocacy groups denounced to this. Yes. Well, it is huge. It is the biggest thing that we have seen since DACA in terms of protections for people. Half a million people, Joy. And these are folks who are married to U.S. citizens, have been here for at least 10 years, have

U.S. citizen children in some cases, not in some cases. And to be able to say to them, President Biden is keeping your family together. He is making sure that you do not have to leave the country and go through some arcane process and maybe not be able to get back and not even be able to get back in, which is why most people didn't do it because they didn't have that guarantee. OK, so Joe Biden wants to engage in this conversation. I'm just telling you, that's not how this conversation is going to go. Maryland Governor Wes Moore.

who's deeply involved with the Biden campaign. He was asked about the killing of Rachel Morin. And he says, well, yeah, it turns out that the migration crisis is really affecting Americans all the way across the spectrum, including in Democratic states. When people think about the border crisis and they think that this is only impacting a handful of states, you know, Hartford County in our state, where this where this where this brutal murder happened is eighteen hundred miles away from the border.

And so when people think this is only impacting a few states, this is impacting every single one of us. This inaction that we continue to see to get any form of sensible immigration policy done is impacting all of us because all of us in local jurisdictions deal with the consequences of this. Again, that is a Democrat. And that's going to be the actual argument. The argument is going to be about Lake and Riley. And it's going to be about Rachel Warren. And it is not going to be about the immigration status of people who are already living in the country and have been doing so for a very long time.

Because it turns out the top of the heap for people's concerns about illegal immigration is first close the border and then decide who gets to stay and who gets to go. One of the things I noticed whenever Joe Biden will roll out a proposal like this, he'll bring up a dreamer, some kid who was born in Mexico or something and arrived in the United States illegally at the age of three and then grew up and became a nurse.

And the answer to that is, okay, that person can stay. But the person who's on welfare cannot. It turns out that the United States does have the single capacity to go through all the people who have illegally immigrated and decide whether they are of net benefit to the United States and its population or whether they are not. Senator Joni Ernst correctly points out that Joe Biden is rolling out the red carpet for illegals. Once again, President Biden has rolled out the red carpet for illegal migrants.

So we're hearing the doublespeak again. Out of one side of his mouth, he's saying, "Look at me, I'm doing an executive order. We're going to control the border." And then on the other hand now, he's offering basically mass amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants that are currently within the country.

Again, you're going to get more and more of these stories leading up to the election. Because it turns out that when you let millions of people through the border unvetted, some of those people are going to be criminals. And when you hear the argument that illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than kind of natural born American citizens, the answer to that is so what? What does that have to do with anything? That's a stupid argument because we are not saying that they have a natural right to be in the United States. We are saying there should be zero crimes from the people that we voluntarily allow to be in the United States.

In just one second, we'll get to Joe Biden's incompetence on foreign policy, which is starting to bear extraordinarily poisonous fruits. Folks, first, let's be real here. The tradition of enjoying a fine cigar is as American as apple pie and the free market. What better way to embrace that tradition this summer than with Mayflower cigars? Picture this. Here it

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Everything seems to be collapsing around Joe Biden because it turns out that weakness in the foreign realm is quickly met with strength by America's enemies. Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signed an agreement that pledges mutual aid if either country faces aggression, a strategic pact that comes as they face escalating standoffs with the West.

unclear exactly what the details of the deal are. Both leaders are describing it as a major upgrade in their relations. So to all of those people on both right and left who seem to be standing for Russia these days, I'll just point out that they are the ones who are allied with an absolute hellhole slave state called North Korea on the one hand, and then another hellhole slave state called China on the other. It turns out in the world, there are some bad guys and there are some good guys. And Vladimir Putin is not one of the good guys.

The summit came as Vladimir Putin visited North Korea for the first time in 24 years, and the U.S. and its allies expressed growing concern over a possible arms arrangement in which Pyongyang provides Moscow with badly needed munitions for its war in Ukraine in exchange for economic assistance and technology transfers that could enhance the threat posed by Kim's nuclear weapons and missile program. Now, one of the things that's truly amazing about the modern world

is that most of the countries we would consider allied countries are countries that rely extraordinarily heavily on tech, like real battlefield tech. You're talking about high tech drones. You are talking about J dams. You're talking about laser guided munitions, all sorts of sophisticated weaponry that are specifically designed in order not to waste shots and really to in the main distinguish military from civilian targets and

And meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, North Korea, these folks, they don't care. So they're using really, really cheap munitions against really, really sophisticated and extraordinarily expensive munition. And so the order of battle over time is going to change radically in favor of the people who are fighting a more basic form of warfare because they don't care about these things.

And let's better just acknowledge that reality. It's true in Israel. It's true in Ukraine. It's true pretty much everywhere. When the bad guys are willing to kill their civilians and yours, and you are spending extraordinary amounts of money

Yes, you're doing the more moral thing in order to not kill their civilians, the civilians they're hiding behind and in many cases sympathize with them. But by the same token, that requires a higher level of willpower and a higher level of expenditure. And that's just the way that it's going to have to work because it turns out that Russia can turn out munitions like nobody's business so long as they are World War II era munitions.

And originally, the theory of the war was that Ukraine's technological advantage would allow it to fight Russia to a standstill. But it turns out that Russia's way of war has always been to grind down its opponents through extraordinary use of bloody brutality to its own soldiers and others. So that is consolidation number one between Russia and North Korea.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has been purging his own military. Supposedly, he's doing so to fight corruption. In reality, the reason that Xi Jinping does anything is to consolidate his own power. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered a redoubled campaign to eradicate graft and enforce loyalty in the military. It's really about enforcing loyalty, suggesting no end to a purge in the country's defense establishment that has raised questions about Beijing's ability to wage war.

She used the first military political work conference in a decade to warn against the dangers of corruption and ideological slippage in the PLA. That's the People's Liberation Army cautioning that decaying discipline could torpedo efforts to field a fighting force capable of taking on powerful Western militaries.

He said the gun barrel must always be grasped by people who are loyal and reliable to the party. So he's tightening his grip on the party. Again, as China enters a state of serious economic and demographic decline, they become more dangerous, not less. Meanwhile, Iran is signaling its own major boost in a nuclear program at a key site.

All of this is perfectly foreseeable. It turns out that when the United States draws a major contrast between itself and its allies in the Middle East, and that's not just Israel, it's also Saudi Arabia. Basically, everybody who's been boxing in Iran, it turns out Iran gets pretty frisky as they've been doing at Israel's northern border, as they've been doing via Hamas, as they've been doing via the Houthis, as they've been doing directly from Iran when they sent 300 odd missiles at Israel, as they've been doing from Iraq.

They've been activating the forces everywhere in the region, and now they're upping the ante on their nuclear program, which is weird because I was informed by the Biden administration that they were going to be able to come in and cut a deal with those nice Iranians. The absolute level of naivete of the foreign policy establishment on the left is it's truly awesome to behold. It is an awe inspiring thing. The belief that the Iranians, they're just, you know, a little misguided, but you can negotiate with them and they're going to come to an agreement because, you know, you negotiate with people you disagree with.

Well, yes, and then the negotiations fail when the people you disagree with actually want to murder you and your family. It turns out it's very difficult to come up with a negotiating tactic that ends that particular demand. According to the Washington Post, a major expansion underway inside Iran's most heavily protected nuclear facility could soon triple the site's production of enriched uranium and give Tehran new options for quickly assembling a nuclear arsenal if it chooses to, according to confidential documents and analysis by weapons experts.

with the IAEA confirmed new construction activity inside the Fordow enrichment plant just days after Tehran formally notified the nuclear washdog of plans for a substantial upgrade at the underground facility built inside a mountain in north central Iran. Iran also disclosed plans for expanding production at its main enrichment plant near the center of Natanz. Now, why are they doing this? Why are they publicly saying they're doing this? The answer is because they believe that the more they publicly threaten, the more the Biden administration will put pressure on Israel. That's what they believe. And they're not wrong. They believe...

And so long as they ratchet up the pressure from Hezbollah, that the thing that Joe Biden wants more than anything else is not to have an ongoing war in the Middle East. And he can't he doesn't have a lot of leverage with Hezbollah. He doesn't have a lot of leverage with Hamas. It's a lot of leverage with Iran. But he he does have some leverage with the Israelis because he can simply hold them back in the middle of a war where young Israelis are going and losing limbs and dying in order to defend their homeland.

It's like an amazing, amazing thing. Donald Trump is not wrong when he says that Joe Biden is humiliating us on the world stage. That is absolutely true. Joe Biden is humiliating our country on the world stage. He's actually humiliating us. You'd saw what happened this this weekend. It's turning the United States into a total joke all over the world. He is absolutely right about that. And what is the comeback of the Biden administration? So you have Putin meeting with

Kim Jong-un, you have Xi on the move. You have the Iranian mullahs who are openly declaring that they are moving forward with their nuclear weapons development. Hezbollah, the head of which, Nasrallah, just gave a speech yesterday in which he declared that he would effectively destroy the state of Israel if he's threatened, which is a bluff tactic because if he actually thought he could do it, he would actually go ahead and do it. You have Hamas still declaring they will not give up hostages in order to gain even a temporary ceasefire.

And meanwhile, what is the comeback of the Biden administration? Donald Trump's a mean man who's orange. He's just mean. He's orange. John Meacham, whatever is the opposite of par excellence, he is the historian opposite of par excellence, John Meacham, but greatly admired by the Biden administration because he keeps pretending that Joe Biden is some sort of FDR-like figure. He says the real problem in this presidential race is that Trump admires authoritarianism. By the way, Trump does not, quote unquote, admire authoritarianism. What he acknowledges is that authoritarians are

are typically savvy players who pursue their interests with strength and alacrity. And that's why you have to face up to them. It's why you have to threaten them. It's why you have to use all the methods at your disposal. As opposed to Joe Biden, who thinks authoritarians are basically nice people who can be massaged into the right positions. Here's John Meacham. Again, this is all, it's such foolishness.

The most concerning part of that alliance is that Donald Trump considers himself to be close friends with every one of those tyrants. That's not true. That's the picture that we should all focus on right now. It's arguably the most important part of this unfolding political campaign is that the Republican nominee wants to be in that frame.

He wants to be walking through squares like that. He, by his own admission, he admires that. He admires the authoritarianism. He admires the toughness.

He admired. No, he just acknowledges what they are. And he knows that you guys don't understand them, which is certainly true. The reality is that the left, they've all become Jane Fonda. It used to be there was a time when the foreign policy establishment among Democrats was significantly tougher than it is today. And people like Zell Miller or Scoop Jackson were Democrats.

And now it turns out the foreign policy establishment is basically Noam Chomsky and Jane Fonda inside the Democratic Party. This podcast is sponsored by IQ Bar. I've got good news and bad news. Here's the bad news. Most protein bars are packed with sugar and unpronounceable ingredients. The good news? There's a better option. I'm Will, and I created IQ Bar plant protein bars to empower doers like you with clean, delicious, low-sugar brain and body fuel. IQ Bars are packed with 12 grams of protein, protein-rich protein,

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with IQ Bar. Go to eatiqbar.com and enter code BAR20 to get 20% off all IQ Bar products plus free shipping. Again, go to eatiqbar.com and enter code BAR20. Here's Jane Fonda's explanation for why she won. I love that Jane Fonda's on CNN. I mean, again, from Hanoi standing alongside anti-aircraft guns

of the of the Viet Cong to CNN in just a few short decades. Here is Jane Fonda explaining that if Orange Man Bad wins next November, it'll be worse for not for the world, not for not for the United States, for the Palestinians. If Orange Man Bad wins. I think that that President Biden is trying to protect Israel, be loyal to Israel, and at the same time demand a ceasefire, demand

that the bombing stopped, that the children stopped being killed. I think he's doing both. But I understand the anguish of the protesters. I can't say that I know what he should do differently because I don't understand the situation well enough. Jane Fonda, we always appreciate speaking with you. Go ahead. Well, just one other thing. If the orange man wins next November, it's going to be much worse for Palestinians. I can say that.

Well, at least you are making your priorities clear, Jane Fonda. Well, meanwhile, folks, even top Democrats are now acknowledging that Joe Biden's reelect strategy is a bit of a disaster. Alex Thompson has a long piece over at Axios. He says senior Democrats, including some of President Biden's aides, are increasingly dubious about his theory for victory in November, which relies on voter concerns about January 6th, political violence, democracy, and Donald Trump's character, which, by the way, is why when it comes to the debate that's about to happen next week, Donald Trump should have some quick throwaway lines.

Some good comebacks on those issues. You know they're going to come up. So it'd be great if he had some sort of one-liner prepared with regard to January 6th. Again, my recommended one-liner for the president when it comes to January 6th is that if he's asked about January 6th, he should say, listen, we have disagreements about what exactly happened in the election of 2020. I left office as constitutionally mandated. Now, that happened in January of 2021.

I've checked the calendar. It is currently June of 2024. And there's been a president in that intervening period. And he's terrible. He's awful. That's why his approval rating is in the 30s. If the American people really thought I was a threat to democracy, do you believe that I would be running even?

with the man who's supposedly saving democracy. People don't think I'm a threat to democracy because they know that I'm not. I spent four years getting through very good policy for the American people. And then regardless of my disagreements, I actually did leave office in January 2021. Meanwhile, your president of the United States is doing X, Y, and Z, right? He needs something, some response there that refocuses people away from January 6th because of course,

This is Joe Biden's entire shtick is that he's going to run on the idea that Trump is a threat to democracy. Biden's core inner circle hasn't lost faith in his approach. That is the product of Biden and his longtime aide, Mike Donilon. But it puts them on an island within much of the party about what will decide the election, as polls consistently show Biden tied or behind, even after a slight bump following Trump's criminal conviction. Several polls indicate voters are deeply concerned about democracy, but they're most worried about inflation and the economy. Biden's former chief of staff, Ron Klain, told Axios his view is in Mike, I trust meeting Mike Donilon.

And the reason they're saying that is because of the 2022 elections where Republicans seemingly underperformed. Now, they're attributing all of this to Joe Biden's signal political genius, which is a pretty crazy approach that Joe Biden didn't didn't beat Donald Trump in 2020 because Trump lost the election, which is actually what happened. Trump was completely erratic about COVID. Trump didn't actually do anything to stop the riots in major American cities. That election race was a mess. Plus, the Democrats changed all the rules. Plus, they suppressed Hunter Biden's laptops, all of that.

But Democrats aren't attributing Biden's victory to any of that. It's all the fact that Joe Biden is apparently amazing at being a politician, which is kind of an amazing conclusion to draw, given the fact that he'd run for president 83 times before he once ran.

Against like James Polk and lost. In any case, the Democrats are a little alarmed. Donilon, Biden's top political aide, privately has reassured people that voters will do the right thing in November by embracing democracy and rejecting Trump. According to a Biden aide who has heard Donilon say it, Joe Biden is a great president and great presidents get reelected is another common dominant Donilon refrain, which, again, the American people really disagree on that one.

Biden's inner circle is cohesive but insular. Apparently, there's an unofficial no new friends rule. So who's the inner circle? It's First Lady Jill Biden's top aide, Anthony Bernal. That makes sense because Jill Biden has to physically walk Joe Biden around these days and then manipulate his face. I still have a feeling that there's like an act. He's like a marionette or a hand puppet at this point. Jill Biden is able to put her hand directly into Joe Biden's brain and then like hit particular neurons. It goes...

It also includes Deputy Chief of Staff Andy Tomasini, a low-profile but powerful aide who's worked for the Bidens since 2008. Despite a year-head start, larger campaign team, and spending more than twice what Trump's team has spent on ads since early March, Biden's numbers are stagnant. Meanwhile, longtime Democratic strategist Howard Wolfson

who worked for Michael Bloomberg in 2020. Okay, so his credentials aren't amazing. But he told Axios, quote, if the election were held today, we'd lose. Can that change? Yes. Is it on the path to do so? I don't see that yet. And it's all going to be about the debate. And they're relying heavily on the moderators in that debate to make the entire debate about Donald Trump, despite the fact that Joe Biden is the actual president of the United States. And they'll get that from the moderators because the media are full scale moderators.

in the tank for Joe Biden. Of course, of course, CBS News has been labeling videos of Joe Biden wandering digitally altered and cheap fakes. Again, this is a narrative that was retailed by the White House. The entire mainstream media took it up and just started repeating it as though it was a fact. So here's CBS News playing a totally non-doctored tape and calling it doctored, basically.

You've probably heard of deep fakes, but just last week as President Biden was at the G7 summit in Italy, cheap fake clips went viral on social media and were picked up by some news outlets. Take a look at this clip, for example. It shows Biden and other world leaders watching a skydiving demonstration before the president is seen walking away and looking in another direction. Outlets, uh,

claimed that he was sort of just aimlessly wandering away. The clip amassed millions of views within just a few hours when actually he, if you widen out, you can see that he was talking to one of the members of the military that was participating in that demonstration. Digitally altered? Digitally altered, what, they put like a fake head on him or something? Like he's an alien?

Truly amazing, truly amazing stuff there from me. And Donald Trump has to know going in, of course, that all the moderators are stacked against him. In fact, Joe Biden preset all of the controls in this debate in his favor. No audience to commercial breaks, which presumably means that Joe Biden will be able to sit down or go to the bathroom or something or have his drugs replenished during those breaks. It's 90 minutes instead of two hours, as these debates usually are a couple of hours.

Trump is doing what I think is a smart thing now. And he's he's actually promoting how well Joe Biden is going to do, which is the smart move. You should be talking up the expectations is actually what you do politically. You point out that Joe Biden in debate has actually overperformed, typically speaking. So he says, don't worry, Biden will show up. He'll show up coked, but he'll show up. Here's Donald Trump. Joe Biden doesn't have a clue. Now we're going to watch. Is anybody going to watch the debate?

He's gonna be so pumped up. He's gonna be pumped up. You know all that stuff that was missing about a month ago from the White House? What happened? Somebody didn't pick up hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cocaine. I wonder who that could have been. I don't know.

Actually, I think it was Joe. Again, funny joke, but also the reality is that Joe Biden will show up for the debate and Donald Trump has to know that apparently he's kind of quietly prepping pretty significantly for the debate. That debate should be focused not on Joe Biden's wandering into walls. It should be focused on the fact that Joe Biden is a very bad president. You keep the focus on Biden and Trump will win again. The focus on Trump, Trump loses. That's the math of this election. And it is indeed that simple. All right, folks, we've reached the end of today's show. We'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

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