On Friday, appearing on Fox & Friends to respond to President Biden’s statement requiring businesses with over 100 employees to “ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated or require any workers who remain unvaccinated to produce a negative test result on at least a weekly basis before coming to work,” Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro stated that his company would “use every method and resource at our disposal to defy the president’s unconstitutional order.”
“I think that he’s made a huge tactical legal blunder here,” Shapiro said. “I think that there’s every possibility that something like this goes to the Supreme Court level, and suddenly we see a complete rewriting of the administrative state because Joe Biden couldn’t get his act in order,” and blasting, “Joe Biden couldn’t get his act in order, and so he decided to issue a tyrannical and authoritarian order here.”
WATCH:
.@BenShapiro on @realDailyWire fighting Biden's vaccine mandate: "We are staffing up right now on the legal side. We are already getting any lawsuit ready…What we can tell you is that the provisions that Joe Biden is going to be citing under OSHA are wildly overbroad." pic.twitter.com/bvIeYVHQod
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 10, 2021
Fox’s Steve Doocy asked, “Ben, your company’s got over 100 employees. So what are you going to do? Are you going to listen to the president, everybody gonna roll up their sleeves or are you going to take a different approach?”
“Of course not,” Shapiro responded. “We’re going to use every method and resource at our disposal to defy the president’s unconstitutional order. And this is coming from somebody who’s very pro-vaccine. I was vaccinated as soon as possible; I’ve encouraged everybody to get the vaccine, or pretty much everybody to get the vaccine. And the notion that the federal government has the ability to force every business in America with over 100 employees — by the way, I’m not sure why it’s over 100 employees, theoretically, it should be every business in America because you can get infected anywhere — every business in America with over 100 employees to either force its employees to vaccinate or force them to test every week or fire them presumably … He said; he came into office saying, ‘I’m not going to shut down the economy; I’m not going to shut down the country; I’m going to shut down the virus,’ he failed to shut down the virus so now he’s going to shut down the economy and the country apparently.”
Co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked, “Well, Ben, he says that businesses who refuse will be fined $14,000 per violation. Your CEO said that you will use legal action to resist, in a tweet. Are you prepared for this?”
“We are,” Shapiro responded. “We are staffing up right now on the legal side. We are already getting any lawsuit ready that needs to be gotten ready. We have to see the actual regulations, know the details of that lawsuit. What we can tell you is that the provisions that Joe Biden is going to be citing under OSHA are wildly overbroad. And frankly, I think that he’s made a huge tactical legal blunder here. I think that there’s every possibility that something like this goes to the Supreme Court level, and suddenly we see a complete rewriting of the administrative state because Joe Biden couldn’t get his act in order, and so he decided to issue a tyrannical and authoritarian order here.”
Co-host Brian Kilmeade noted, “Also, you had an interesting tweet which is getting a lot of news; you said, “Maybe if we tell Joe Biden that the Taliban isn’t vaccinated he’ll get just as mad at them.” Does it astound you, in all seriousness, that his anger is focused on the unvaccinated in America, as small a percentage as that is, and not on the terrorist regime that has taken over a country and the embarrassment that he’s caused our nation?”
“We’re not even a year into this presidency and this is a failed president on every level and so he’s attempting to redirect all of the ire at his presidency at your fellow Americans,” Shapiro answered. “You’re supposed to be angry at your neighbor for not vaccinating if you’re vaccinated, even though Joe Biden himself yesterday said that your unvaccinated neighbor effectively poses no threat to you. Instead, Joe Biden wants you to be angry at that neighbor as opposed to him.”
“Here’s the reality: If you don’t like lockdowns; if you don’t like mandates; look at the person who’s attempting to issue the lockdowns and the mandates; the person who’s attempting to control American business top-down, who’s attempting to control every school in America top-down. Maybe you should direct your anger at that person, not the person living next door,” he continued.
Doocy referred to Shapiro’s move from California to Florida, then asked, “I wanted you to weigh in on the fact that coming up next week they’re going to have the recall election of Gavin Newsom in California. He, very famously, pretty much locked down all of California.” Doocy noted the attack on GOP gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder by a white woman in a gorilla mask, then showed a clip of Elder on Fox saying, “If I were a Democrat, obviously, this would be called systemic racism; they’d be calling it a hate crime.” Elder continued by noting that despite the fact that he would be the first black governor in California, The New York Times elided that fact when writing about him but trumpeted the first female governor of New York, although she was not elected to the post and he would have to be elected.
Doocy commented, ”Ben, you know, there seems to be a double standard in this country when it comes to conservatives.”
“Well, of course,” Shapiro replied. “If Larry Elder were a Democrat we know it would have been front page news; there would have been talk about how this white woman throwing an egg at a black man was just evidence that nothing has changed over the last 150 years, but because Larry’s a Republican and Larry’s a conservative/libertarian, this means that Larry’s the actual white supremacist according to the op-ed writers for the Los Angeles Times and the woman who’s throwing eggs at him while wearing a gorilla mask is an anti-racism activist. It’s very strange how none of the other standards seem to hold as long as the target’s a conservative.”
Asked if the Democrats are panicked about California Democrat governor Gavin Newsom’s possible recall, as Vice President Kamala Harris and Senator Elizabeth Warren have campaigned for Newsom, Shapiro answered, “They’re certainly scared. Gavin Newsom has poured ten times the amount of money as Larry has into this campaign to prevent him from being recalled in a state that is entirely Democratic. Remember, there is a supermajority in the legislature for Democrats. It’s essentially a one-party state and now Gavin Newsom is in danger of being recalled, which just demonstrates how a guy who is widely perceived as a possible presidential nominee in the future has now collapsed in on himself like a dying star because he’s been such a poor governor of the state and all of the bad governance of the past ten years, the same stuff that drove me and my company out of the state, is now coming back to haunt the Democrats.”
Earhardt asked, “There’s a whistleblower inside Google that’s reportedly saying they are undergoing anti-racism training, white supremacy training to prevent being a white supremacist. It features you at the base of this pyramid; it’s called the “White Supremacy Pyramid.” It features you at the base before it works its way to different individuals. What is your reaction to this?”
“It’s pathetic that the most powerful company on Planet Earth because Google is the most powerful company on Planet earth in terms of informational dissemination, is purveying misinformation and lies to its own employees,” Shapiro fired. “And it’s just demonstrative of the fact that corporations have gone woke because they are filled with cowards and afraid of the radical Left, because there is nothing remotely, remotely related to reality in this presentation. I’m an Orthodox Jew; I’ve been extraordinarily outspoken about white supremacy to the point where the FBI had to arrest somebody two years ago for threatening my family, a white supremacist. Nonetheless, Google pushing this stuff just demonstrates what utter yellow-bellied cowards they are. It’s unbelievable.”
Doocy asked if Google’s algorithm had affected Shapiro or his business, Shapiro replied, “Well, it sort of depends on the timing. There have been problems with Google in the past, where the way their search algorithm works is that results that are unflattering to conservatives come up pretty regularly, or that they had a Google fact check for a while that was specifically directed at only conservative outlets, not just mine, but others like The Daily Caller or Breitbart. We do have to cope with this from time to time, and none of that has surprised anybody on the right side of the aisle.”