Leftists OCCUPY Speaker McCarthy’s Office, Plus Gavin Newsom GRILLED About COVID Lockdowns

Alright, Liz Wheeler Show episode 423, take one. 

The anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks is always a surreal day. I think for those of us who remember it. I know some of you watching this show, were not yet born a lot of Gen Z. This is actually the difference between Gen Z and the millennial generation. Gen Z wasn’t born on nine 11, so they have no memory of it. They just read about it in the history books, which is kind of hard for me as a millennial to fathom. Maybe it’s how World War II vets feel about Pearl Harbor. We weren’t there. They still remember the feeling of it. It’s always kind of a surreal day because everyone as individuals remembers what they were doing, who they were with, where they were, what they thought, the patriotism, the anger, the grief that churns in us remembering that day. And it’s also a really fascinating day to be online, especially on X, formerly known as Twitter. 

People share their stories and this year particularly, I saw more stories than ever before of heroes of nine 11 whose names aren’t famous, regular everyday people who acted in just the most courageous, self-sacrificial way to save other people’s lives and it’s really touching. I know X gets a lot of flack for being a toxic place where people are constantly shouting at each other and dehumanizing each other. But on September 11th, it’s a pretty touching place to be, to see people’s stories. There’s also a ton of conspiracy theories about nine 11 on X, which are not my favorite part of it, but the stories that people share are quite something. This might be the most interesting post that I saw about September 11th on X this year, and it’s not a memory of someone who was lost and it’s not an act of heroism. It’s political analysis of 9 11, 22 years later that I think a lot of conservatives are just understanding the context of for the first time, I know I am at least, and this was written by Sean Davis from The Federalist. 

He said, in hindsight nine 11 looks like it might have been the beginning of the end of the American Empire. It spawned the worst and most destructive foreign policy in the country’s history. The government response to nine 11 birthed the constitutional abomination that is the modern warrantless surveillance state. The Patriot Act enabled the government to weaponize its vast resources against its own people. Bush’s failed foreign policy led directly to Obama’s presidency and indirectly to Biden’s, both of which are responsible for diminishing the US at home and abroad militarily and economically. After two failed forever wars, that wouldn’t have happened without nine 11. Our government is now desperately trying to foment potentially nuclear forever war against Russia. Meanwhile, all the massive surveillance powers claimed by the US after nine 11 are being ruthlessly deployed against American political enemies of the regime via the most insidious censorship industrial complex the world has ever seen. 

And then there’s the crippling legacy of debts enabled by America’s response to nine 11, not content to spend trillions on, poorly thought out invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Our leaders spent as thoughtlessly at home creating insane amounts of new entitlements while doing nothing to put the country on a sound financial footing. And where are we today? The ruling political party is criminalizing its opposition and attempting to throw its top political opponent and his supporters in prison all under the guise of democracy. We generally remember nine 11 as the day the towers came down. I wonder if historians will look back on it as the day that America started to fall. 

What do you think? I’ve probably read this half a dozen times today because I think he’s right. I think he’s correct and I want to give kudos actually to the small number of people after nine 11 who were opponents of the Patriot Act who opposed George Bush establishing the Department of Homeland Security. A lot of us forget that the Department of Homeland Security wasn’t even a thing until after nine 11. It was instituted by Bush, an additional administrative agency in response to the nine 11 terror attacks. And I want to give kudos to, it was mostly libertarians at the time. It wasn’t a lot of mainstream Republicans and conservatives who spoke out on the potential dangers of a expanding administrative agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, but also on the surveillance that was allowed under the Patriot Act surveillance of US citizens. Even our metadata, things that we were told weren’t identifying about us unless we were talking to terrorists about terrorists or sending money to terror sponsoring states, et cetera, et cetera. 

A lot of people issued warnings and I think there are also a lot of conservatives and Republicans. I know that I am in this camp and this is a mea culpa who didn’t realize the severity of those policies at the time. Now, I was only, what, 12 years old, so maybe there’s some justification for me not understanding the depth of how dangerous those policies were. But a lot of people, good faith conservatives and Republicans didn’t realize how quickly our government could be weaponized against us. And I think Sean Davis is correct. We are living the repercussions of policies that were implemented because of nine 11 that perhaps wouldn’t have been implemented in the way that they were except that nine 11 happened. And that of course brings us to the million dollar question. We have to ask this every year, and that is was nine 11 the result of an intelligence failure? 

Was this the intelligence community not listening to their sources on the ground, not believing the credibility of the information that about nine 11 the warnings about a terror attack that they did have? Or was this just one of those tragic, horrible things that no one possibly could be expected to anticipate before it happened and yet everyone, once it happened, wished that there was something we could have done? I’m starting to fall more in the former camp because of the complete lack of trust the intelligence community has demonstrated towards us something I think more Republicans, and this is not me being a conspiracy theorists, I don’t believe in this inside Job nine 11 conspiracy. True. There’s, I don’t believe any of that. That stuff’s ridiculous. This was obviously carried out by terrorists, but did the intelligence community have any forewarning of this? Did they take the action they should have taken to prevent this or did they not? 

That’s a question. I think conservatives and Republicans, and maybe this is something for members of Congress to do even because they’re the ones who have access to this type of classified information and this kind of investigation into the origins of how did this worst attack since Pearl Harbor, how was this possible that it was committed on our homeland and that we weren’t able to stop it before it happened? That’s what I think conservatives should focus on if we want to actually prevent something like this from happening again and to hold accountable the intelligence agencies that now are abusing the powers that they were given as a result of this attack. By the way, president Biden didn’t go to ground zero to commemorate nine 11, which I don’t understand any kind of decision-making process that would result in the President of the United States. Not going to ground zero on September 11th to commemorate this, but so Fox News very oddly defended the fact that Joe Biden was absent from the nine 11 memorial ceremony and this was the excuse that Fox gave on air. Take a listen to this. 

Well, our focus the last couple days has been on President Biden here in South Asia, and when I asked the White House official why it is that President Biden was here and missing the nine 11 commemorations at the attack sites, the analogy that I was given is that 22 years after Pearl Harbor, US presidents were not still going to visit Hawaii. 

You guys have to be the ones to decide that. Is that a good excuse or is that not a good excuse? To me, that seems like the worst excuse possible. Well, after Pearl Harbor 22 years later, presidents just went about their business. They didn’t go to Hawaii. I mean, think about the difference in the context here, right? First of all, we live in the 21st century, so Joe Biden traveling from the White House to New York is probably like a 40 minute ride in Air Force One. If he even has to take Air Force one, maybe he just takes Marine one, the helicopter up there that takes 45 minutes. That’s not a big deal. Versus back then when Pearl Harbor was attacked, traveling to Hawaii was a really big deal. I mean, it’s still kind of a big deal because it takes a long time to fly, but it was a really big deal for a president to do that. 

This is the worst excuse ever. The worst excuse ever for the most disrespectful president. The president. He’s already demonstrated honestly what he thinks of Americans who lose their lives. He’s the one who abandoned Afghanistan and abandoned our service members in Afghanistan, and as a result, 13 of them were killed by Isis K working in tandem with the Taliban. Meanwhile, at the Capitol, radical leftists have occupied speaker Kevin McCarthy’s office. Yes, you heard that correctly. Radical leftists have occupied the Office of House speaker Kevin McCarthy. This is a video of it. Take a look at what they’re doing. They’re staging a sit-in to protest the fact that Republicans are opposing legislation that they want. This is legislation related to aids, hiv aids 

Passed. Now 

You can see them. They’re occupying the office 

Pass pass. 

What’s very interesting about this 

McCarthy Pass, 

What’s very interesting about this would be an answer to the question. And any leftist is welcome to weigh in here, particularly leftists who are celebrating the convictions of the proud boys for their role in January 6th. I would really appreciate an explanation for why this, what we just saw, this occupation of Speaker of McCarthy’s office doesn’t qualify as obstruction of an official proceeding. If you are in an office in the Capitol where you are not supposed to be and you are yelling and screaming in order to influence government officials to do something that they don’t want to do, and you are stopping the, or impeding in some way the operations of a member of the US Congress, how is this not obstruction of an official proceeding using the definition that the Department of Justice has leveraged against January 6th? Defendants? How come these people aren’t being thrown into pretrial detention for two years? 

How come they’re not in solitary confinement? How come they’re not being charged as seditious conspiracists trying to overthrow the US government? Because isn’t that kind of the same thing? Because if it’s not, then I need the left to explain to me what the difference is between people on January 6th who were walking peacefully through the capitol accompanied by police officers. The guy that put his feet on Speaker Pelosi’s desk, he’s in prison for four years. How come these people are walking free? What is the difference? The difference of course, is just the politics of the people, which shows you that we live in a two-tiered system. So I hate to give credit to Chuck Todd because it’s Chuck Todd. He doesn’t deserve a lot of credit. Usually he’s a whiny shill for the Democrat party. However, in this particular case, he grilled California governor Gavin Newsom about how Newsom handled Covid in California. And Chuck Todd actually asked Gavin Newsom some pretty good questions and pressed him when Gavin Newsom turned into the slime ball that he is. Take a look at this. 

During Covid, you were pretty strict with the lockdowns here, and there was an interesting piece in Harper’s that sort of was critical of your decisions from this perspective. You found a way to allow the motion picture industry and the sort of the movie industry to get back to work, but you didn’t allow people to grieve together at funerals or at churches and that this may be why there’s such a polarized disconnect. What you prioritize this is this anger between the populace and the elite. Supposedly here you prioritize this industry, but you were tougher on those that just wanted to go worship. What do you say to that, Chris? I think there’s 

A lot of humility and we didn’t know what we didn’t know, and it was hardly we collectively, I think all of us in terms of, okay, 

Pause it for one second, pause for one second there. So humility is the first word that he said. Humility would be admitting that you got something terribly wrong and taking responsibility for something you got wrong without trying to make an excuse for it. That’s why that humility has the same root as humiliation because an embarrassing thing, it is a mark, a bad mark on your reputation if you were so wrong about something and you shouldn’t have been wrong about something. But humility is the last word that I would use to describe Gavin Newsom because the first thing he does is he doesn’t take personal responsibility. He says, I we’re talking, we here, this was collective action. We took Governor Newsom. Let me remind you, I lived in San Diego at the time, and I know that you’re going to blame this on local officials, but local officials wouldn’t have been allowed to do this. 

Had you done your duty as governor and prohibited this kind of lockdown? I lived a mile from the beach in San Diego. I lived in Pacific Beach, San Diego. The beaches were closed down. I walked half a block from my house up the hill to Kate Sessions Park. You guys can all look this up so you understand what Kate Sessions park is. It is a steep hill covered entirely with grass. It’s a park that people like to bring their dogs to. And I walked from my house to Kate Sessions park in the middle of a sunny afternoon, 75 degrees, not a cloud in the sky. I sat down on the grass in Kate Sessions Park, not a sole, was within 200 yards of me, not another soul and a police officer on an A T V comes careening over the top of the hill, stops his a t v next to us. 

Keep in mind he’s the only person that we have been within 200 yards of, let alone six feet. And he says, it’s illegal for you to be here. And I was like, illegal for me to be here. He says, it’s illegal for you to be in the park right now. And I said, why? And he said, because the covid lockdowns are prohibiting people from sunbathing in the park. And I wasn’t even sunbathing. I was just sitting there on the grass. Yes, in the middle of the summer. In the summer. Well, it wasn’t the summer, but San Diego was always summer in the middle of the sun. He made us leave the park. The San Diego Police made me leave Kate Sessions Park sitting on the grass because of the lockdowns in California. Gavin Newsom, governor Newsom. This was not collective action. This was action taken from the top that trickled it down. 

You enabled and empowered local jurisdictions to lock us in our homes. And no, we didn’t learn something. We didn’t know this excuse that people give that, oh, well, we know differently now than we did that. No, no, no, no, no, no. We knew at the time that respiratory viruses don’t transmit when you are more than 200 yards away from someone else in the middle of the sun in an outdoor space. We’ve known this for a long time. We didn’t just learn about germs, we didn’t just learn about viruses. But this excuse, anytime you hear this excuse from any politician, you know they’re trying to dodge responsibility because we knew enough. I knew enough, and I wasn’t even the governor. I knew enough at the time to tell you the World Health Organization is wrong on their infection. Fatality, right? This is not impacting children anyway. 

That you are only at high risk of this if you are old or obese. And that masking social distancing and lockdowns do not work. And that is why they were never recommended in public health literature. It was just a new power grab from people like Gavin Newsom, who by the way, didn’t believe in his own lockdowns because what was he doing while we were all prohibited from doing anything? He was dining with his friends at the French Laundry, massless, congregating with other people while us, sorry, people we’re prohibited from even dining out with our family and friends. Let’s restart the video. 

We’ve evolved. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. We’re experts. In hindsight, we’re all geniuses. 

Now think about you, what you ended up collectively prioritizing. You’re prioritizing in industry one specific one, but then didn’t prioritize maybe ones that whose maybe values you didn’t connect 

With. I don’t think it’s a binary. There was iterations within that theme. There was fits and starts. There were regional frameworks that had impacts more broadly defined. There were more industry specific frameworks. All of us went through a process. I mean, there was few states that didn’t go into aggressive lockdowns, including Florida’s Ron. No, I understand that, but it was more, but within the framework of the industry who opened the door, it’s what industry got leniency and which ones didn’t. All of it is legitimate in terms of reflection. All of it’s legitimate in terms of processing lessons learned. We went through a process. I actually had it Sunny Lands, which is the Camp David on the West coast. We brought together experts across the spectrum, people that supported our efforts, people that opposed them, international experts. And we spent three days really reflecting stress testing what we did right? 

What we did wrong. We’re actually putting out a report as it relates to our own lessons learned. I think this country would do well to advance a similar construct, not through the lens or prisms of an ideology, but through you think there should be almost like a nine 11 commission on what lessons learned from this pandemic. There’s been versions of that, but they’re immediately dismissed within the prism of our partisan frame. And so I’m at least trying to work across that. And in context of all at local, what is something you’d do differently? Well, I think we would’ve done everything differently. We understood, we would understand outdoors as an example in nature. You wouldn’t have shut schools down. You had to try to figure out how to maybe have outdoor classrooms. Well, now you’re getting being. I think the nature of the spread early on in understanding epidemiology of that spread, understanding the spread in the context of how it spread very differently indoors than outdoors is one perfect example. What a lot of us would’ve done differently, including again in states real 

Estate. Okay, let’s stop, right? Let’s stop right there. First of all, he’s doing it again. He’s saying, oh, we didn’t understand. Well, if you’re too dumb to understand viruses, we’ve had viruses for, we’ve known about how viruses are transmitted for hundreds of years. If you’re too dumb to know that, then you’re not qualified. This is what really burns me up about this guy is he’s talking about reflections. He doesn’t mention the word accountability. So what’s reflection like? Oh, let me just journal about the mistakes I made. And then he said, you should engage in self-reflection. We all should. No, dude, you are the one that was in charge. You’re the one that was a tyrant during covid. You should be held accountable. It has nothing to do with just you learning from your mistakes. You messed up. You ruin people’s lives. You should be out of there, out of there. 

And like I said, kudos to Chuck Todd. I didn’t know he had it in him to actually ask decent questions, but he certainly did There. So the US Open, this was one of the funniest things. I didn’t get a chance to watch it this past weekend, although I was following along mostly on X, formerly known as Twitter, but Novak Djokovich, you’re familiar with that name because he is not only one of the best tennis players in the entire world. He was barred from playing in the US Open last year because he declined the Covid vaccine and he wasn’t allowed to enter the United States because he is not a US citizen. You remember this. And he stuck to his guns, which I was very impressed by. I have a ton of respect for people who are willing to stand by their principles even when it means in this case, probably losing out on another open title. 

Novak Djokovich nonetheless stuck to his guns. He did not cave. He did not get the Covid vaccine. Well, finally, the US rescinded their vaccine mandate for entry into the United States for foreign nationals. So Novak Djokovich was allowed to play in the 2023 US Open. He won. He’s an incredible tennis player. At the end of the match, there is a featured shot of the day. It’s usually the winning shot that shows the champion actually emerging as a champion. This is the shot of the day, but please, please listen very closely to who is the sponsor of this shot of the day. Take a look. 

Oh boy. Well, we’ll take you to the Moderna shot of the day. And it was saving the match point of the match match point to get to number 24. There were a lot of shots that were highly impactful, but here’s the final one. Another day of the office relief and release there. 

And there it is. He won. 

So the shot of the day 

Brought to you by shaking hands with his opponents, the shot of the day, brought to you by Moderna, brought to you by Moderna. That is the height of poetic justice. I could not be more thrilled that Djokovich won the US Open specifically so we could get that video clip of the Moderna shot of the day with the UN Vaxxed Djokovich winning that spot and the status where we found, or that post on X where we found that or saw that video. Look at this caption, it says, seems Novak knows how to pick his shots both on and off the court. Excellent pun. Excellent pun, excellent pun. Meanwhile, SportsCenter, and we could bring this up on the screen. So on the women’s side of the US open, SportsCenter, describe Coco Goff winning the women’s US Open. It says, Coco Goff took a moment to soak it all in after winning her first Grand Grand Slam title. 

However, soak it All In is interesting verbiage for SportsCenter to choose given what Coco Goff actually did. So let’s play this video and I’ll narrate it. For those of you who aren’t watching, she gets off of her chair. She kneels before her chair folds, her hands bows her head. Obviously praying could not be clearer that this woman dropped to her knees to thank the Lord for the victory that she just obtained with the body that God created her with. And yet all SportsCenter can say is she took a moment to soak it all in. No, no, no, no. She was praying. She was praying to God. She was praying to Jesus. And you can’t bring yourself to say that because our culture is so anti-Christian that they can’t even acknowledge that the vast majority of us are still active practicing Christians here. So this was an interesting post that I found on X. 

It went viral. It was from a left. It’s from a leftist named Robert Reich. He is a Berkeley professor. He’s also the former US Secretary of Labor. And I want to respond to this because I do think that this warrants a response not just from me, but from every conservative possible. So Robert Reich is a Berkeley professor, which kind of right there tells you you need to know. He’s also the former Secretary of Labor and he made a post on X that went viral. It’s been viewed by over two and a half million people. And this is what he said. He said, the next time you hear conservatives use any of the following terms, ask for a definition, they won’t have any. The terms he listed are woke critical race theory, cancel culture and socialism. He then goes on to say they just want to stoke culture wars to divert attention from economic looting and oligarchy. 

So economic, looting and oligarchy. He’s referring to the free market economy here. But I do think this is actually an important point to bring up. The definitions of these terms are important. It’s important for us as conservatives to understand ’em. We’ve talked about this as it relates to the word woke, especially because over the past couple months, there’ve been instances where conservatives haven’t been able to define the word woke because, and it’s not necessarily a reflection on conservatives lack of understanding of what wokeness is. It’s something that we can more, a lot of us just recognize. We know that that’s woke when we see it, even if we can’t give an academic definition of it. However, an academic definition is still really important. So I’d like to offer some definitions to Robert Reich for what these terms mean. The word woke or wokeness is just the modern euphemism for Paulo Free’s critical consciousness. 

Paulo Free is a Brazilian Marxist who I discuss at length in my book, hide Your Children, exposing the Marxist behind the Attack in America’s kids. And he contended that there’s no such thing as knowledge. There’s no such thing as truth. What teachers teach to children in school. This was his contention, is just the prevailing political narrative. Whoever is the winner of the political narrative, competition gets the claim on the word knowledge. And he said, given that that just makes schools political indoctrination centers, he said, what teachers should do is should teach children critical consciousness or how to view the world. Well, critical consciousness is just another word for viewing the world for a lens of Marxism. So Paulo Fre is critical consciousness. We now call this wokeness in the United States. It’s just the idea that you’re looking at something through this lens where you were constantly labeling certain groups as oppressors and other groups as oppresses a classic Marxist dialectic. 

And I know that’s very academic. I know you all understand this and we’ve talked about it at great length. It is important for conservatives to be able to articulate this because that’s what we’re seeing in the United States. It’s not just this random made up word for a concept of crazy, insane things. No, no. This is actual Marxism that came from a specific person who constructed a specific strategy for how to train young people through the public school system to be Marxist revolutionaries. So that’s the definition of the word woke. The definition of the word critical race theory. Critical race theory is the grandchild of Max Heimer critical theory. Max Heimer was a Marxist, a neo-Marxist at the Frankfurt school. Critical theory is essentially the idea that you can destroy a prevailing narrative by relentless criticism. He also rejected the idea of objective reality. He also, like Paulo Fre believed that truth, truth wasn’t really objective truth. 

Truth was just the prevailing political narrative. And so he contended that you could destroy institutions by leveraging constant criticism at them and placing them within this Marxist dialectic of oppressors or oppressed. Critical race theory just applies that to race, which is exactly why we see children in the United States and public schools being told they’re racist just because they’re whites. They’re being labeled as the oppressors based on the color of their skin. Black children are told they’re oppressed. They’re being labeled the oppressed, obviously based only on the color of their skin. This is critical. Race theory is a neo-Marxist theory. That’s the definition of it. Cancel culture is either social ostracization or censorship intended to enforce a radical leftist ideology in our institutions. It’s intended not only to silence dissenters, but to frighten everyone else into not speaking out against radical leftist ideology and socialism. Of course, this perhaps is the most elementary definition of all, but it is government control of the means of production and distribution, which is exactly what the radical left people like a O C and Bernie Sanders outright admit this, but the radical left, this is what they want. 

They don’t believe in private property. They want the government to be in control of everything. So those are my definitions. You can add to my definitions. You can criticize my definitions, but we should have these tucked away in our minds. When people like Robert Wright make these baseless claims that conservatives don’t know the definitions to these words, it’s not only important that we do know them, we actually do know them. And once we know them, we can play offense against people who believe this toxic poison and are trying to impose it on our country. Guys, thanks for watching today. Thanks for listening. Make sure you pick up your copy of my upcoming book. It’s coming out in two weeks. Hide your Children, exposing the Marxists behind the attack on America’s kids. You can go to hide your children book.com. Get your copy. It’ll be to you in two weeks. Two weeks. I’m Liz Wheeler. This the Liz Wheeler Show.