Ep. 2096 - Democrats UNLEASH On Biden Over Hunter Pardon
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Well, the fallout continues from Joe Biden pardoning his own son for pretty much every crime for a decade. Those that have been charged and those that remain uncharged. We'll get to that in a moment. First, if you haven't heard, Daily Wire Plus is 50% off right now. It is our best deal of the year.

That is one full year of uncensored shows, exclusive series, documentaries, and more. Do not wait. The deal ends soon. Head on over to dailywire.com slash cyber week and join the fight today. All right. So as we know, on Sunday evening, President Joe Biden decided to give a blanket pardon to his son Hunter for any and all activities. There's a scene in the Three Musketeers in

in which the Cardinal Richelieu decides that he is going to give one of his henchmen a prospective pardon for anything that he or she is going to do at any point. The note says the bearer has done what has been done. That's essentially what Joe Biden did with his son Hunter. He essentially wrote him a pardon brief that allowed him any crime for about a decade, which is an amazingly broad pardon.

In fact, it's almost unprecedented in American history. The only precedent that anybody can find that is this broad is the Gerald Ford pardon of Richard Nixon, which was specifically designed to basically quiet any and all problems surrounding Watergate.

and any sort of ancillary legal issues that would have arisen therefrom with regard to Richard Nixon. The goal was get that off the American people's table and let them move on to the next thing. That is not true with regard to Hunter Biden. This is the president of the United States pardoning his son for any and all crimes, including those that were never charged. Now, why is he doing that? He's doing that because he believes that the incoming Trump DOJ is going to look into Hunter Biden's financial improprieties, gonna look into the Biden family corruption,

And so it's not just about Hunter. It really is about Joe. In fact, you could say that the Richard Nixon precedent is maybe the best precedent here, because really, what is Joe Biden doing here? He's attempting to pardon himself. He can't pardon himself because he hasn't been charged with any crimes and he wants to pretend that he's not guilty of any crimes. What he's really doing here is he is getting Hunter off the table to get himself off the table. That is the goal. I mean, there's really no other way to explain this.

According to Margaret Love, U.S. pardon attorney from 1990 to 1997, this is very broad. She called it unprecedented except for the Richard Nixon pardon. She says, quote, it does not pardon specific offenses, but rather takes a rather broad time span and pardons anything, any crime that may have been committed during that time span. Mark Osler, professor of law at University of St. Thomas said, quote, this is very unusual. It's unusual enough to grant clemency in a case where there hasn't yet been a conviction. It's rarer still to have the breadth of this one. And that's right. I mean, this is an insanely broad pardon.

And it's meant to cover everything from violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act to further tax crimes to the possibility of bribery. It's meant to cover pretty much everything for a decade long period. Now, Joe Biden is not answering questions about any of this. He issued the pardon and then he immediately went to Angola.

I do wonder at this point whether as almost a transitional move, he resigns from the presidency like a month before his term is up because he clearly no longer cares. He's clearly no longer invested in being president of the United States. He's not been invested in being president of the United States since he was ousted from the nomination for reelection.

This is the kind of move that you make when you're saying F you to your own party and to the American people, pardoning your son on any and all charges for a decade and then taking off on a plane to go to Angola while answering zero questions. Here was President Biden ignoring questions from the press yesterday. Mr. President. Mr. President, what's changed?

He's walking toward Air Force One, just ignoring all the questions as per his usual arrangement. Jill Biden did answer a question. She said that, of course, she supports the pardon because, of course, Hunter Biden is her son. You wouldn't expect anything less from Jill Biden. Obviously, Jill is one of the Biden family members who has been greatly enriched by her husband's presence in politics. Thanks for coming, guys. Dr. Biden, do you support the pardon of Hunter? No.

She says, of course, I support the pardon as she hugs a bunch of children during a Christmas event. Apparently, this was in the offing for a long time.

Joe Biden had been claiming since July that he was not going to pardon his son, but he clearly wanted to pardon his son. Everybody knew it. CNN's Jake Tapper reported yesterday that Joe Biden has been discussing this pretty openly inside the White House since June.

Sources told CNN today that President Biden did not go through the office of the pardon attorney at the Justice Department as is standard. In fact, President Biden has been discussing pardoning his son with top aides since Hunter's conviction in June, according to NBC News' reporting. Okay, that is amazing. So he didn't go through even the normal pardon procedure. Instead, he just went directly around it. Why? Well, because there are two possible reasons. One is that Joe actually is guilty of further crimes.

which certainly is plausible. And given the documentary evidence, Joe Biden was vice president of the United States while his son Hunter was traveling to China, traveling to Ukraine, picking up giant sacks of cash with money being held in trust for quote unquote, the big guy. That's while his father was vice president of the United States. And that is nothing new. Joe Biden has been venally using his office since he entered office. The reality of Joe Biden's corruption is the baseline of his career.

The fact is that since he was elected to the Senate in Delaware, he's been using his office in order to promote his family members, ranging from getting special bank benefits for members of his family to getting jobs for his son Hunter back in the 1990s while giving special benefits to the various companies that hired him. This is really, you know, again, pretty clearly an attempt by Joe Biden to head off questions about his own corruption.

But there's something else going on here, and that is something even worse. Right now, Democrats have basically decided that they are going to preemptively use every option on the table rather than sticking with any set of rules. One of the reasons that norms have actually declined in politics, and you keep hearing that Donald Trump has broken the norms. He's breaking all the norms. Let's trace the history here of how and why this pardon happened.

So Joe Biden is pretty openly saying that the reason that he is doing this is because he believes that Donald Trump is going to come in and prosecute him. And the reason he believes that Donald Trump is going to come in and prosecute him is because Donald Trump has been appointing people who have been saying that they might, in fact, look into Hunter and Joe Biden, that the Biden issues aren't going to end with the Biden presidency. But why is that happening? Why is Donald Trump saying any of that? Why is Joe Biden taking that seriously?

Now, Joe Biden would say he's taking that seriously because Donald Trump is that kind of guy. But we know that Donald Trump actually is not that kind of guy. You will recall all the way back to 2015, 2016, when Donald Trump was running for president of the United States and crowds were chanting, lock her up about Hillary Clinton.

And Donald Trump said openly in a debate that if he were president, Hillary Clinton would probably be in jail. And then you know what he didn't do? Any of that. The DOJ was not activated in order to get his political opponent, who had basically been ended on the public stage in a presidential election. You know who did do it? Joe Biden. So after the 2020 election, it was Joe Biden's DOJ that decided to drill down on Donald Trump.

And that was after four long years of career appointees inside the FBI and the DOJ drilling down on Donald Trump. So Democrats initiated this conflict, and now they are afraid of the blowback. They're afraid that Donald Trump will do the same thing to them. And so Joe Biden is now preemptively using the pardon power in a unique and unprecedented way in order to avoid this.

Well, we have now entered an era where that norm has been broken, too. And so you can imagine easily a situation in which every president the last day in office has to pardon himself and all of his family members just to avoid a future in which the opposite party comes in and prosecutes everybody. You can easily see that happening. Is the next Democratic president going to prosecute Donald Trump for something? I mean, I'd be shocked if they didn't try to.

Is the next Democratic president going to come in and pledge to prosecute members of Donald Trump's family? I mean, hell, they basically did it while Donald Trump was president. So why wouldn't they? That is the world in which we now live. Democrats have been breaking precedents and norms for the last 15 years in American politics. And then in anticipation of Republicans doing the same thing, they break the next norm. So they break the norm about not prosecuting their political opponents. And then in order to prevent Republicans from prosecuting them back, they're issuing blanket pardons to people like Hunter Biden.

This is how norms get destroyed. The actual norms destroyers in the country right now are the Democrats. It's Democrats who talk about destroying the filibuster.

It's Democrats who talk about utilizing the deep state in order to thwart the leader of the executive branch. It's Democrats who talk about how they want to pack the Supreme Court. These are all destructions of norms Democrats are doing. And they're doing it preemptively because they say, if we don't do it, the other side will. But here's the thing. When Republicans have power, they're not doing those things. Republicans right now are not talking about nuking the filibuster. Only Democrats are talking about nuking the filibuster if they had a majority. Now, there's something Republicans can do about many of these things.

And that is they can force Democrats to abide by their stated belief system. So if Democrats, for example, right now are very pro filibuster, Republicans should right now in the Senate, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, incoming Senate Majority Leader Thune, he should immediately say that he is going to pursue a constitutional amendment to enshrine the filibuster in the Constitution. A constitutional amendment requires two thirds of the members present in the Senate and in the House in order to pass filibuster.

So John Thune should say, listen, we're going to pass this overwhelmingly because right now you guys want the filibuster and we're fine with the filibuster. But we're either going to pass it right now and make it part of the Constitution permanently or we're going to nuke it ourselves in 12 or 18 months. That suggestion is not my own. That's a suggestion from my business partner, Jeremy Boring. I think that is quite right. The problem is once we are on a pathway to breaking every norm, the next norm will be broken in expectation that the other side will probably do it. You have an arms race of breaking norms.

But the problem is that it's actually a one-sided arms race. The only party that keeps breaking the norms, and then they're surprised when the rules swing back around on them like a boomerang, are the Democrats.

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I mean, take, for example, the argument that the DOJ is politicized. So Democrats politicized the DOJ. They did. Democrats decided during the first Trump administration that insiders at the DOJ were going to initiate a completely spurious investigation into Donald Trump's team. That actually happened during the Obama administration originally. That led to Russiagate. It led to the Mueller report. It led to FBI leaks and James Comey and all the rest of it. They politicized the DOJ. And then Donald Trump noted that the DOJ was politicized.

And then Joe Biden claims now that the DOJ is politicized, but only against Democrats. That is the case that he is making. So in his little statement, pardoning Hunter Biden, Joe Biden suggested that his son had been selectively prosecuted. Now, if Donald Trump says that about the DOJ, everybody on the left says that's a lie. There's no way. When Joe Biden says the DOJ selectively prosecuted his son, which isn't true, crickets, absolute crickets. Now, for his part, the special counsel, David Weiss, they pushed back.

They said, quote, there was none and has never been any evidence of vindictive or selective prosecution in this case. In fact, the reality is that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden were let off the hook by the DOJ. Joe Biden and Hunter Biden went out of their way to be let off the hook by the DOJ. The DOJ had Joe Biden dead to rights on mishandling of classified information. And Robert Herr wrote a report saying that Joe Biden could not be prosecuted because he was senile. His senility was his get out of jail free card.

Hunter Biden was offered a sweetheart deal of all sweetheart deals by the DOJ, such a sweetheart deal that a judge looked at it and said, there's no way I can sign off on all of this. But still, Joe Biden is claiming selective prosecution by the DOJ. But then at the same time, they want to claim that the DOJ is not politicized. Here's Karine Jean-Pierre yesterday.

Does the president believe now and agree with President-elect Trump that the justice system has been weaponized for political purposes and that it needs root and branch reform? No. Read the president's statement. Seriously, read the president's statement. He said he believes in the Department of Justice. He does.

He says it in his statement. He also believes that war politics infected the process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.

He believes his son was unfairly targeted. He said that what his political opponents have done to my son, that's his words, is cruel and enough is enough. He says he believes in the justice system. And I said both things. No, but no, no, no, no. Both things. Well, I'm not going to. I can only speak for this president. I'm not going to speak for anybody else. Well, I mean, you're not going to speak for the president or anybody else. It's literally your job to do that, lady. But again, he's.

Here's the thing. The real reason that some Democrats today are upset with Joe Biden is not because Joe Biden pardoned Hunter. The real reason they're upset with what Joe Biden did is because once again, a new rule has been set and they know that that rule is going to come back around. It's going to swing back around and hammer them directly in the head. Senator Michael Bennett, Democrat of Colorado, he ripped into Joe Biden yesterday. He said, quote, President Biden's decision is

put personal interest ahead of duty and further erodes Americans' faith that the justice system is fair and equal for all.

He's right about that. But again, it isn't fair and equal for all. Donald Trump had pointed this out. Now Joe Biden is just acknowledging the obvious as well, except this time it actually was fair with regard to his son. And somehow that is now unfair. Claire McCaskill, former senator, she is making clear that the reason she's upset is because it's going to give ammunition to Trump. She's not upset on principle at what Joe Biden did. If Joe Biden could get away with it, she'd be fine with it. What she's afraid of is that now that the pardon power has been used this way, Donald Trump will use the pardon power this way.

Well, then maybe you should tell your own side to stop breaking the norms. And the party of norms is ready to violate any norm in pursuit of power. This is the story of the Democratic Party over the course of my lifetime.

They are not in favor of norms. They hate norms. They're willing to destroy every norm from social institutions like churches to governmental institutions like the Senate and the Supreme Court in solely solely in pursuit power. That's what's happening here. Now you're just mad because Joe Biden made it obvious because he was too stupid to do it subtly the way that you would prefer. Here's Claire McCaskill lamenting. Here's the thing.

Do I understand Joe Biden's pardon? Yes, completely. I get it. It's completely understandable. But the both sides folks out there have just gotten some really powerful ammunition. And for that reason, I hate it.

I don't hate it that he did it. I get it. I understand it. I don't blame it. You know, he's a wonderful man and he loves his family desperately. And I admire him for that. He has a sense of family above almost anything else in the world. But he said he wouldn't do it.

Repeatedly, he said he wouldn't do it. Again, the real reason she's upset is not because Joe Biden lied. The real reason she's upset is not because Joe Biden did it. The real reason she's upset is because Joe Biden exposed the fact that Democrats are willing to use power in pursuit of their own agenda at the cost of any and all norms.

That is the reality of what Democrats are doing right now. Full credit to Charlemagne the God who pointed this out. He says, listen, you guys have been saying that the Republicans are the norm violators. They're the ones who are breaking the systems, but you guys are the ones breaking the systems too. Don't give me this crap. Good for Charlemagne.

I just want Democrats to stop acting like they are on this moral high ground politically when they have shown us they're not. You know, whether it's skipping the primary process when Biden stepped down to things like Biden pardoning his son. Stop acting like you're the pure party and Republicans aren't. And it also shows me elected officials can do whatever they want as long as they have the political will and courage to do it.

You know, that sort of hypocrisy eventually led even some members of the media to actually ask Democrats hard questions. Every so often, the media, when their agenda is exposed in their own defense, they have to go after Democrats. So you'll remember they did this after Joe Biden was proved senile live on stage in a debate with Donald Trump. They then had to pretend that they were shocked, shocked that any of this was happening.

Well, the media knew full well that Joe Biden is corrupt. They've known for years that Joe Biden is corrupt, but they have to pretend that they are shocked by Joe Biden's corruption, which means that you get these sort of occasional glimpses like stars emerging from a cloudy sky of honesty. So yesterday, CNN's Breonna Keller made Democrat of New York Daniel Goldman watch video of himself saying that Joe Biden would not pardon Hunter.

You went out on a limb backing up Biden when he said that there would not be a pardon in July of 2023, just after that plea deal fell through. This is what you said. I want to watch. Do you think a pardon for his son would be a mistake?

Yes. And I don't think there's any chance that President Biden is going to do that, unlike his predecessor, who pardoned all of his friends and anyone who had any access to him. And I think you see that in this case where he kept on and Merrick Garland kept on a Trump appointed U.S. attorney to investigate the president's son. If there is not an indication of the independence of the Department of Justice beyond that, I don't know what what we could look for.

What does that feel like? Watching yourself back then reassuring people that Biden was not going to issue a pardon for his son. Yeah, and I think that if that plea agreement and that plea deal had gone through, there would be no pardon. That was a satisfactory outcome. It had already fallen through. Sorry? When you reacted, this was when the deal had fallen through. And I hear what you're saying about the Kash Patel appointment, but, you know,

You took him at his word. So what does that feel like knowing that he's gone back on it? Well, as I said, I'm disappointed that after the plea fell through and it became clear about how

why it did, including Republican congressional intervention in this case, which made this case very unique and very different from any other case. I think that we all perhaps I should have as well recognized that this is not the normal prosecution. I said many times that if Hunter Biden were not

Hunter Biden, he would never be charged with these crimes. And when you start to see what Donald Trump is planning to do with his Department of Justice and with his FBI and the degree to which Hunter Biden has already been shamelessly attacked as a private citizen by Republicans,

I certainly understand why the president felt like this miscarriage of justice should not carry forward and that he should not be at risk of retributive prosecution. Okay, enough of this guy. I mean, man, he's just going to keep on humping that basketball over there. It's Dan Goldman. It's amazing. This guy was involved in both impeachment efforts.

of Donald Trump. But don't worry, the only politicization that happened is with regard to Hunter Biden. Well, the media may sometimes randomly hit the nail on the head, but most of the time, not so much. Because you know what the radical left will never understand? The profound and unshakable bond between the Christian and Jewish communities in America. While the secular left pushes their anti-religious agenda, Christians and Jews have stood together

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Okay, well, we have now reached the point in America's institutions where the institutions are perceived by the American public as so corrupt that they require a cleansing. And that is what Donald Trump is pledging to do. Now, is that going to restore a sense of normalcy in the institutions? No, I think that it takes a long time for a sense of normalcy to ever be restored to these institutions. They may have to be completely torn to the ground and rebuilt in order for that legitimacy to return. I mean, that's how badly these institutions have been corrupted.

And that predates what is happening here with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. It's just that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden are making perfectly clear to everybody how corrupt all of this is. It's still fun to watch some Democrats try to defend Joe and Hunter. I mean, you have to give points to Whoopi Goldberg for effort. So Whoopi Goldberg over on The View, she said, don't worry, Joe never lied. Joe never lied. And they don't pay her enough to be this kind of partisan. Seriously. I mean, she's getting paid a lot of money. She's not getting paid enough by the Democratic Party. That's for sure.

respect it as a parent. I understand why he would do it. But I wanted to understand why lie about it for so long. I've stopped calling it a lie. Okay, why repeatedly say you're not going to and you do? And secondarily, for the part of this country, half of it that doesn't support Biden, doesn't know him personally, doesn't get to have phone calls, and they're just looking at a system that seems like

It only benefits the people who are in power. What precedent does that set? Well, here's what it sets. It's a precedent for all of us to open our eyes because we've elected someone who is in a similar situation, who didn't have a drug problem, who knew what he was doing, who clearly stood and said, I can do this. And he did it. So I think, for many, many reasons,

This is very different than any other situation that we have ever dealt with, because when we're talking about who gets a pardon and who doesn't get a pardon, this man, I think Biden had no intentions of pardoning Hunter. And I think the more stuff that went down.

I think he said, well, why am I busting my behind to stay straight and do this when nobody else is? OK. And as Alyssa Farah points out, the actual reason that Joe said that he wasn't going to pardon Hunter is because he figured that Kamala Harris would. He figured that Kamala Harris would commute a sentence after she was elected president of the United States.

And then hilariously, because God has an amazing sense of humor, Kamala Harris somehow blew the election to Donald Trump in historic fashion. Hey, well, there is one piece of good news for Republicans aside from the obvious exposure of the Democrats as venal, corrupt, and power hungry. And that is the unintended consequence of giving a pardon to Hunter Biden is he can no longer plead the Fifth Amendment. It's a point I made yesterday on the show, seconded by Senator Tom Cotton, another Harvard Law School graduate from Arkansas. Here's Senator Cotton.

I will say this, though. Joe Biden may come to regret this decision because having given his son a blanket pardon of 11 years to include time when Joe Biden was vice president, Hunter Biden now can't plead the fifth if he appears before Congress or appears before Congress.

a grand jury. He has to testify about exactly what he was up to, for instance, when he was traveling to China on Air Force Two and meeting with Chinese communist princelings or why he was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to sit on a Ukrainian energy company's board for which he had no qualifications.

So that may be one unintended consequence of this pardon that Joe Biden didn't fully think through. OK, that is absolutely true. Now, again, when it comes to the corruption of our institutions, that continues apace. And it really is crisis point in America with regard to the corruption of these institutions. See, as a conservative, I think that institutions are really crucial. They shape the people who go into them.

There's a reliance for our liberty on functional institutions. And as those institutions are hollowed out and become corrupt, it makes it very, very difficult for liberty to become the baseline that we all live with. So, for example, when it comes to free markets, you require a couple of things for free markets to function. One, private property, obviously.

and two, consistent rule of law. If there's no consistent rule of law, and anybody can grab anybody else's property at any time, or the government can come in and seize your property at any time, there is no way for markets to function because you have no incentive to invest. You know that the money can get stolen at any time. You need workable, consistent rules.

with institutions that act in unbiased fashion. Well, all of this is now going by the wayside throughout our institutions. This is the corruption of the left. The left has unfortunately always been a sort of post-modernist institution in the sense that it's all about power.

Going all the way back to Karl Marx, the argument is that pretty much all human relations are power dynamics and power relations. And thus, you are justified in using any means necessary to accomplish your goals. That was only made clear, obviously, over the course of the 20th century by people on the left. But it's now become part and parcel of pretty much every institution. As the left enters institutions, it

it corrupts them and destroys them. Whether we were talking about the DOJ, whether we were talking about the FBI, or whether we were talking about the courts. So Elon Musk has now been hit with an insane judgment. It really is quite insane. So this insane judgment comes courtesy of a chancellor in Delaware named Kathleen McCormick, who voided a pay plan for Elon Musk. Now, if Elon Musk were not named Elon Musk, if Elon Musk weren't in fact an apolitical president,

totally benign, absolutely anodyne CEO of a company, would he be having $56 billion in values revoked from him? This is actually a major story because it is a confiscation of private property and an invasion of freedom of contract. So for those who don't know this story, the basic story goes like this. Back in 2018, Elon Musk took control of Tesla. And one of the things that he put in place was zero compensation for himself. Zero. Zero.

There was only one proviso, which is that if he achieved returns on the stock price of Tesla at an extraordinary rate, then he would get a big payday.

So as Nellie Bowles has pointed out at the Free Press, when Elon Musk announced he didn't need a salary from Tesla but wanted instead to make a bet that if the company grew to a market cap of $650 billion, you'd get an enormous payout, just about everybody laughed. That figure was more than 10 times the value of Tesla at the time. In fact, the New York Times' top business writer, Andrew Ross Sorkin, said it was the, quote, most radical compensation plan in corporate history.

Sorkin said, quote, he gets no salary, cash bonus, equity. He gets only equity that vests over time, but only if he reaches these hurdle rates, which are, I dare I say, crazy. The Washington Post's own business writer said that the deal was, quote, the Elon Musk of corporate pay deals, a cocksure all or nothing moonshot into history. Nobody suggested this was a deal that was designed to bankrupt Tesla or that the deal was an insider deal or anything. The hot take, according to Nellie Bowles, was that the deal was technically kosher, but that Elon Musk must be an idiot.

The board unanimously approved the compensation plan. Tesla shareholders then approved the grant with 73% voting in his favor. And then it turns out that Tesla became the largest, most high-value market cap car company on planet Earth, and he hit the mark. And then he got the payday. Except now this chancellor is attempting to claw it back. According to CNBC...

The package, worth about $56 billion, was the largest compensation plan in U.S. history for a public company executive. Tesla said in a post on social media, which Musk owns, that it plans to appeal the ruling. Musk called the ruling absolute corruption. In January, the chancellor, Kathleen McCormick, voided the pay plan, ruling that Musk had individually controlled Tesla and dictated the terms of his own compensation to a board that didn't fairly negotiate. So Tesla then went back in June at its annual meeting in Texas and asked investors to ratify the 2018 CEO pay plan. And they did.

And then the chancellor still avoided the pay plan. McCormick wrote, quote, even if a stockholder vote could have a ratifying effect, it could not do so here. Where the courts condone the practice of allowing defeated parties to create new facts for the purpose of revising judgments, lawsuits would become interminable. That is the stupidest argument in human history. So if there is a trial and then after the trial, you and I decide that we are going to have a settlement.

Does the judge suddenly declare, we're in the middle of the trial, we decide that we can go outside and have a settlement. Does the judge declare that settlement talks are bad because the settlement talks would somehow preclude a judgment from being found? That is not how that works. No one believes that's how the judicial system works.

Who actually got paid? Well, somebody did. As it turns out, money did change hands. McCormick ended up approving a $345 million attorney fee award for the lawyers who successfully sued on behalf of a minority of Tesla shareholders in order to void Musk's pay plans. The lawyers got super rich, as always. Musk, for his part, suggests that this is corruption. He is right about that. It is ridiculous. It is a taking in violation of the Constitution of the United States. And you would imagine that Musk is going to appeal here.

But you wonder why these institutions are widely perceived as corrupt. This is why they are widely perceived as corrupt. The system on every level is now widely perceived as corrupt. And that is a problem. It is a real problem. It is a problem from the DOJ to the FBI to the Delaware Chancellery of Law.

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If you've ever thought about joining DailyWire Plus, now would be the moment. Our best deal of the year is here. It ends this week, 50% off new annual memberships to DailyWire Plus. Let me say that again, 50% off for an entire year of DailyWire Plus. That means one year of uncensored daily shows with limited ads, access to our entire entertainment catalog, including Am I Racist? and Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's new series, The Gospels. And for families...

You have unlimited access to our kids at Benkei. If you're already a member, it's the holiday season. Give that gift of DailyWire Plus. Save 50% on a gift membership. There's never been a better time to join. Head on over to dailywireplus.com slash cyberweek right now. No code necessary. Just 50% off. But hurry. This deal ends soon. Don't wait. Join the fight today. Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth, President Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, has fallen under significant fire, particularly from the press. So there's another hit piece from The New Yorker that came out on Monday, making a wide variety of wild claims.

about Pete Hegseth. That piece suggests that Hegseth was, quote, forced to step down as president of the advocacy group Concerned Veterans for America that made, quote, serious allegations of misconduct. So what exactly are those allegations? Well, some of those allegations are manhandling of strippers, for example, the allegation that he went to some sort of club and was shouting about killing Muslims or something. Okay, the allegations are quite wild.

Now, according to Compact Magazine, it is clear that they are probably untrue. Saurabh Amari writes, quote, in interviews with me, two former senior leaders of CVA have denied the whistleblower allegations against Hegseth. They insisted he left the organization voluntarily without any pressure bearing down on him from its funders. Unlike the New Yorker sources, one of Hegseth's CVA defenders spoke on the record.

Sean Parnell, former U.S. Army Airborne Ranger who retired as a captain with a purple heart and two bronze stars and served as senior advisor at CVA during Hegseth's tenure, said, quote, I was just there for most of these alleged incidents, and this stuff is complete fabrication. Parnell asserted the whistleblower claims had come from people who were let go as the organization was growing, weren't fulfilling their duties, they just weren't.

Another veteran of the war on terror said, quote, all false. These were false allegations made by a group of disgruntled employees fired by Pete. In some cases, according to this veteran, the complainants attributed their own carousing to Hegseth.

Parnell and the second CBA veteran also rejected the New Yorker's claim that Hegseth was forced out of his position at the organization because of personal misconduct. Parnell says, quote,

Parnell says he was already a Fox News contributor. ABC was interested in him. He didn't leave for no reason at all. But again, the smears are going to keep on coming for Pete Hegseth, largely because so many people see Pete Hegseth as a threat to the system. And meanwhile, Hegseth apparently had a bit of a tete-a-tete with a Fox News reporter. According to Fox News reporter Chad Pergram,

He was reporting that Pam Bondi might be easier to confirm than Matt Gaetz, but Pete Hegseth could be a problem. And then apparently Hegseth addressed a press gaggle in the halls of the Capitol building. At which point on tape, CBS News' Nicole Killian asked Hegseth, quote, when you were at Concerned Veterans of America, were you ever drunk while traveling on the job? And Hegseth said, I won't dignify that with a response.

Okay, which again, I think is the proper response from Pete Hegseth at this point. There's a reason why the media are out to get Hegseth in a way that they weren't even out to get, I think, Matt Gaetz. And these sort of organic objections to Hegseth do not exist in the same way that they did with regard to Matt Gaetz.

And meanwhile, it is clear that the Trump foreign policy is going to be very different from the Joe Biden foreign policy. Yesterday, Trump issued an amazing statement with regard to the hostages currently being held by Hamas. Here's the statement, quote, everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely and against the will of the entire world in the Middle East. But it's all talk and no action. Please let this truth prevail.

served to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20th, 2025, the date that I proudly assume office as president of the United States, there will be all hell to pay, that's all caps, in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anyone has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America. Release the hostages now. And now just imagine if Joe Biden had taken that position from the very beginning of this war. This war would have been over six months ago. Okay, but Donald Trump is doing that.

So what exactly is that going to look like for President Trump? Well, there are a wide variety of things that President Trump could do. So for example, he could put heavy pressure on both Qatar and Turkey. Qatar has serious connections with Hamas. That is why the Hamas leadership was until very recently staying in Qatar. Qatar plays all sides of every field.

They pour money into American universities. They pour money into soccer teams. They host the Olympics. They host the World Cup. They do all of these things in order to shield themselves from criticism, but they effectively are an Iranian cat's paw. The United States could easily say that we are going to remove our air base from Qatar if Qatar doesn't pressure Hamas to release the hostages. The United States could also take measures against Turkey. The government of Turkey, which is an Islamist government currently supporting Sunni ISIS members,

in Syria, among others, and currently playing host to wounded Hamas members and Hamas leadership, we could simply say to them, listen, whatever membership in NATO you have is going to be immediately revoked unless you guys get on board, expel Hamas, and force Hamas to release the hostages. That could certainly be something.

In terms of on-the-ground action, let's say that there is no incentive structure from outside the Gaza Strip that could actually be brought to bear on members of Hamas inside the Gaza Strip. There are still things that the United States could do. Number one, the United States could theoretically relieve pressure on the Israelis to perform humanitarian aid functions that Hamas is stealing. One of the things that Hamas has been doing, one of the things keeping Hamas alive,

is the massive amounts of humanitarian aid that are being shipped into the Gaza Strip and that are subsequently being stolen by Hamas. Now, Hamas doesn't care if its own people starve. Hamas does not care if Palestinians die en masse. In fact, that was the entire purpose of the war. Their goal was to kill enough Israelis to prompt a serious military response in the hopes that Israel would end up mass killing civilians so that Hamas could claim that it was the victim and then get the world on board for actions against Israel. That was their pretty open goal. So they don't care if Hamas...

affiliated civilians or non-affiliated civilians die in the Gaza Strip. However, it is true that Hamas has been making its money by stealing humanitarian aid at point of gun and then reselling it to people in the Gaza Strip or seizing the aid and using it for themselves. If the United States were to say, listen, no more humanitarian aid until the hostages are given up, at the very least, Hamas would be deprived of its lifeline and its monetary supply.

And then there's a proposal that's been put forward by Eugene Kantorovich, who is a legal scholar from Israel. This is a proposal that I think would probably be the most successful proposal. This is a proposal that suggests that the thing that Hamas and terrorists in the Palestinian Authority and the rest care about most is grabbing more and more and more territory. If, however...

that were to reverse, if holding the hostages were to result in more territory being annexed by Israel with the permission and acquiescence of the United States, then that would actually reverse the polarity. See, the thing is that if you're going to exert pressure on Hamas, you have to find something they care about. They don't care about dead civilians. They don't seem to care about money very much, obviously, because the Israeli government has been offering a reward of $5 million for any person who frees a hostage and instant transport out of the Gaza Strip.

But Kantorovich points out that one of the things that the United States could do, he says, for every day Hamas does not give up the hostages, America could recognize 100 square dunam of Gaza as a permanent Israeli buffer zone. For every murdered hostage, 1,000 square dunam, and then do it. The war would be over in days. A dunam is approximately...

a quarter of an acre. So basically, his suggestion is that for every single day that Hamas doesn't give up their hostages, America recognizes that 25 square acres of Gaza disappear. They become part of a buffer zone in which nobody lives in the Gaza Strip, and the territory just keeps shrinking. So Hamas would have achieved the reverse of its supposed goals in this war, which was to extirpate the state of Israel. Instead, they would be extirpating their own territory.

This is easily the best suggestion by Kontorovich. The bottom line is that the entire orientation of the Trump administration is very different from the Biden administration when it comes to this conflict. The Biden administration keeps trying to play halfsies with terrorists over and over and over. In fact, it was the Biden administration playing halfsies with terrorists that led to the breakdown of the ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel yesterday. So basically, that ceasefire, which was signed just about a week ago,

That ceasefire gave Israel the ability to continue to do anti-terror operations if Hezbollah were to ship weaponry or personnel south of the Latani River in Lebanon. And the Biden administration has been yelling at Israel for enforcing that.

So basically, the Biden administration position is that actually Hezbollah can willy-nilly violate the ceasefire by shipping both personnel and material south of Latani with the acquiescence or in spite of any resistance by the Lebanese armed forces and that Israel could do nothing. Well, the minute that the American government said that publicly, that now gave Hezbollah every ability to do exactly what it wanted to do and up the ante again and violate the ceasefire.

Which is why yesterday, Hezbollah fired at Israeli-controlled territory for the first time since the ceasefire was reached last week, prompting Israel to launch a wave of airstrikes in Lebanon as each side blamed the other for violating the tenuous truce. The Israeli military said two Hezbollah projectiles fell in open areas without causing casualties. The Lebanese armed group said its launches had been prompted by, quote,

Now, again, the reason that they are doing that is because Hezbollah terrorists have been crossing the Latani and they've been shipping in material and they've been moving up on the Lebanese border once again. The only reason they think they can get away with that is because Joe Biden is a fool and a simpleton and so are the rest of the members of his foreign policy administration. They are jokes. And because they are jokes, Hezbollah is treating them as jokes. That is going to end the minute that Donald Trump enters office. In fact, if Hamas were to cut a deal today,

One of the things that would be very clear is that they are cutting a deal because they know that they better cut a deal now with Joe Biden, sop that he is in office rather than Donald Trump, because they're going to get a much worse deal out of President Trump than they're going to get out of the pathetic and weak spined Biden administration.

Well, folks, meanwhile, over at the Supreme Court, there is a big case that is being heard all about, quote unquote, transgender rights. What is it really about? Well, the case is called United States versus Scrumetti. And it's about whether a Tennessee law that bans gender transition sex change techniques used on minors violates the Constitution's equal protection guarantee. The basic idea here would somehow be that if you are a state that says

that boys cannot become girls and girls cannot become boys, and you enshrine that in law. You are violating equal rights under the Constitution, which is an insane contention. Joining me on the line to discuss is Chloe Cole, detransitioner. So she had a double mastectomy at 15 and draws from her personal experiences to shed light on the distressing consequences of gender-affirming care for adolescents. Chloe, thanks so much for the time. Really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. So for those who don't know your story, why don't you tell your story, how you got sucked into this whole ridiculous worldview and what happened? So growing up, before all this happened to me, I was quite a bit on the tomboyish side, especially considering I have a few older brothers and I had some body image issues. I had an early puberty and all of that culminated into me having distress around my sex and

and my body and just the fact that I was female. I didn't know at the time that these were just normal developmental feelings. Instead, I was affirmed in this newfound male identity by the transgender community and by my doctors.

And they had told me, they told me, my parents, that this was the way to go, that I would be happy and healthy and whole in pursuing a gender transition. There never was any other alternative that was given to us.

They completely ignored the concerns of my parents in regards to how this would affect me over the years and whether I might regret this or not. And they told them, well, if you don't allow your child to basically undergo this as she pleases, then you're probably going to have a dead daughter on your hands versus a live transgender son. So my parents were completely emotionally manipulated into this.

I started the process at a pretty young age. I was 13 years old when I was put on Lupron, which has previously been used as a chemical castration agent and a cancer drug to stop my puberty and weekly injections of male hormones. And at 15 years old, I underwent my first and my only surgery during this time. I had a radical double mastectomy to remove my breasts.

And it took less than a year after that for me to realize that this all was a mistake, that I never should have gone through this, that this was never actually going to turn me into a young man. I was just becoming a young woman with less parts of my body and less function in my body. And that I was okay, that one day I wanted to become a mother, I wanted to become a wife, and this potential was taking away my ability to do all of that. But

I never had to do any of it to be whole in the first place because I was a beautiful child the way that I was. And so at the age of 16, I stopped my transition following this major epiphany for me. And that's really why this case is so dear to me. It's the culmination of this battle to protect children all the way up until this point.

So, you know, obviously, you know, when people are undergoing gender dysphoria, when people are uncomfortable in their own bodies, the medical industry has decided that they're not, as you mentioned, going to offer any alternatives at all. In fact, it's now considered, quote unquote,

sort of a gender conversion. It's considered conversion therapy. It's forbidden to suggest that maybe you ought to rethink your presuppositions about what gender you are. In fact, we're supposed to just cut off healthy body parts or inject people with hormones. Well, since you decided to detransition, what's your mental health been like since then? I mean, I have been much healthier in every single way since then, both physically and psychologically and emotionally.

I was done a major disservice being told that my path to happiness was living a lie every day, trying to chase something that could never become true. And I suffered some physical ailments from it. And it was a lot of pressure trying to live as a young man every day when really I was just a tomboyish, outside-the-box thinking and traumatized young woman.

I found, I mean, I still experience discomfort around my sex and around my body to this day. But what has helped that more than lying to myself about who I really am is just accepting that there are things that I cannot change. I cannot change the fact that I was born female. But even as difficult as it can be, there is a lot of beauty in that. There are gifts that come with being born as either male and female. And I was made this way for a reason.

So when you look at this case and you hear the arguments that it would be some form of sex discrimination not to allow children to be transitioned, what do you make of that? Obviously, you have a personal stake in this case. Well, it's not discrimination at all, actually. We're not discriminating against children of either sex or children who are trans identified. We're barring these treatments completely for the use of trying to transition children at all, regardless of how the child feels about it, how they identify. And

Sure, a lot of people on the left will claim that this is a subversion of a parent's rights and of children's rights, but a parent, no adult has the right to harm a child. A parent's rights end where it infringes on their child's. This is very clearly developmentally dangerous for a kid. And whether a child feels in the moment that they are of the opposite sex or they have this distress around their body,

those momentary feelings should not dictate how the rest of their life plays out. These are medications and surgeries that affect you permanently. They are not reversible in any capacity. And that we are arguing whether it's ethical to castrate or disfigure a gender-confused child is ridiculous enough, but also that we're arguing whether it's constitutional or not

is insane. I mean, when the founding fathers wrote the Constitution, there is no way that they could have foreseen that people in the future would be using it as an excuse to perpetuate the institutional abuse of children.

So let's talk for just one second about the reaction to your own detransition. One of the things that I think is so amazing is that the same people who are arguing for tolerance and diversity are radically intolerant and indeed quite angry at people like you who are now making clear that it's a mistake to perform these radical procedures on children. What's been the reaction of sort of transgender advocates to you? From the very beginning of my detransition, before I was even in the public sphere talking about my experience,

I received a lot of negative reactions, a lot of hatred. At best, people in the transgender community were slowly distancing themselves from me or telling me that it was making them uncomfortable just that I was talking about my grief and the way that it was affecting me mentally and physically.

And at worst, like I've had people go out of their way to harass me, to tell me that I should be ashamed of myself, that this is all my fault, that I only had myself to blame and attacking me or my family.

And as I've gone public, I mean, going into it, I knew that I was going to experience a much greater form of that. I've had protests at pretty much every university that I've spoken at. I've had people send me threats of death, rape, send me physical hate mail and actively harass my family through their social media accounts.

I mean, it's been scary at times. My personal safety has been put at risk just for the fact that I'm talking about my own personal experience in advocating for the safety of children and for their families. But what really shocked me is that I have received so much more love and appreciation and support than I ever have any hate in this journey.

Well, that's Chloe Cole. Chloe, really appreciate your bravery in talking so openly about all of this and good luck in everything you're doing. Thank you so much. Alrighty, folks, coming up, we're gonna get to the latest in the Daniel Penny trial, which is in fact just an insane, insane trial of not only an innocent man, but a hero. If you're not a member, become a member, use code Shapiro checkout for two months free on all annual plans. Click that link in the description and join us.

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