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Major breaking news from the Daily Wire over the Biden administration cracking down on pro lifers. You won't believe the extent to which the Biden DOJ was targeting people who actually stand up against abortion. And of course, President Trump is now in a war of words with Pope Leo. President Trump, in my opinion, is right on the politics and he's wrong on the rhetoric. Criticizing Pope Leo's politics, that's fully within bounds because, you know, the pope sometimes talks politics and criticizing President Trump's approach because he should be more respectful to the pope. The same. But we are going to talk today about why Pope Leo and the president ought to find an off ramp here. Spoiler alert. They tend to agree on some pretty fundamental issues ranging from protection of Christians to, you know, not killing the unborn or transing the kids. And here's the thing. If you are one of those people who favors every single one of the seven deadly sins, or you're a person rooting for the triumph of radical Islam, or you are a radical Muslim yourself and you are attempting to pursue the extermination of Christianity. And somehow you are now hiding behind the pope's robes in order to go after President Trump. We can all see you. This is the Ben Shapiro Show. So the Daily Wire has some pretty astonishing reporting here today. Again, just another reason you should become a member over at Daily Wire so we can continue to bring you these kinds of important breaking stories. So it turns out that the Biden administration was literally partnering with abortion activists to track and imprison pro lifers I mean, that's how bad the Biden administration was. This is why when I see the president and Pope Leo going at it, I think to myself, if we're going to talk about presidents who are legitimately attacking Catholics, we should really be talking about Barack Obama, who went after the little sister of the poor and decided that he was going to mainstream every sin he could find. And we should talk about Joe Biden, who apparently was using the DoJ to go after pro lifers, which is insane. That's insane. According to daily wire reporting, President Biden's administration relied on information gathered from radical pro abortion groups to track, prosecute and snoop on peaceful pro life protesters who were later arrested by the FBI. Shocking emails released Tuesday by the Trump administration show so there was a DOJ report. It was titled the Biden Administration's weaponization of the FACE Act. It examined more than 700,000 records. The FACE act is a bill that was designed to prevent people from obstructing entry to abortion clinics. Also, the FACE act at the same time said that you weren't allowed to invade churches during services. You'll remember the Face act came up in the context of Don Lemon and his friends invading a church service in order to protest ICE and disturbing the church service and all of the rest. So the dossiers that were examined by the DOJ contained information of pro life activists who had not yet been charged with any federal crimes, but they were deemed threats by abortion groups because of their activism. And again, we've seen this kind of pattern emerge in all of the reporting from the Biden administration. Over and over and over, they were using left wing cutout groups in order to do their dirty work. Whether it was the Biden administration, State Department contracting out to other services to promote boycotts of right wing news outlets, or whether it was the Biden administration outsourcing its investigative pursuits to anti life pro choice organizations to target pro lifers. This is a thing the Biden administration liked to do. According to the daily wire reporting, the weaponization can be traced to Merrick Garland's resurrection of the National Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Healthcare Providers. The the month after the supreme court overturned Roe versus Wade in June 2022, that task force was operating out of the department's Civil Rights division under the direction of Sanjay Patel, who was reportedly fired on Monday. Patel was on texting terms with the National Abortion Federation security team and was regularly communicating with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Feminist Majority foundation, according to the doj. So again, it turns out that members of the Biden DOJ were coordinating openly with various abortion groups and leaders in the abortion movement. Apparently he told one FBI agent that a person named Michelle Davidson, who is the security director for the National Abortion Federation was a wonderful contact as it relates to face investigations and was an MVP bringing incidents to the attention of the of the doj. One dossier that was given to Patel from an abortion group in 2021 contained information including addresses, photographs, including spouses and young kids, names of associates and affiliated ministries, information about upcoming travel plans or planned protests, even driver's license numbers of pro life activists before they had actually committed any crime at all. And actually social media posts were being flagged by these pro choice activists and sent over to the doj. Here, for example, is an image of the DOJ asking this person, Michelle Davidson, about a an evangelical Christian from Michigan who would go around doing pro life activism. This is the email from Sanjay Patel over at the DOJ to Michelle Davidson over at pro choice.org hi Michelle, do you have any info on Zastron Code's Travel to Montana? One 136 page DOJ dossier documented the attendees of a conference hosted by Operation Save America, a pro life group. And apparently that dossier suggested, quote, the entire Zastrow family is engaged in anti choice activities and sometimes refers to themselves as Zastrow Holiness Revival Team. And again, all these people who were mentioned, including members of the Zastro family and other people that the Zastro family was associated with, were later prosecuted by the Biden administration. And this is all part of these nongovernmental organizations working hand in glove with the federal government under Joe Biden. So again, the short story here is the Biden DOJ was working with non governmental organizations in order to target pro life activists. And as it turns out, daily wire reporting looked into the sentences that were sought by the Biden DOJ against pro Life act pro life activists. And what they found is that the Biden DOJ asked for a longer average sentence for pro life defendants compared to pro abortion defendants. Actual sentences shook out to an average of 14 months for pro life defendants versus 3 months for pro choice defendants. Again, this is astonishing stuff. It demonstrates full scale the animus that the Biden administration had for the pro life movement. And again, this is nothing new. This is nothing new. I mean, you go all the way back to the Clinton administration and the attempt to target political adversaries using the DOJ is perfectly obvious. This is why all of the heartburn, I think proper heartburn in some cases. About the Trump DOJ going after political opponents. The glass was already broken. I've said this 1,000 times. I've said 1,000 times that the left likes to say that Donald Trump broke all the rules, that he's the one who killed the American political system. The reality is the American political system was already dead and Trump stumbled upon it. Barack Obama used his IRS to go after pro life groups, to go after conservative groups, Tea Party groups. It was Joe Biden's DOJ going after pro lifers. I mean, there is nothing new here. Democrats have been doing this for a very, very long time. All President Trump is, in essence, is turnabout as fair play. Now, again, that doesn't justify what President Trump has done with the doj. I've criticized the president when it comes to DOJ prosecutions that I think are unjustified and going after former officials. With that said, the fact that this will make no front page news, none that the Biden DOJ was going after, again, pro lifers in unique ways and coordinating with outside groups to do that. Imagine the scandal if, for example, the Trump administration was coordinating with pro life groups to go after abortion advocates. Can you imagine the scandal? Can you imagine the front page coverage? It would be very real. Now, one of the questions here is how people who are involved in this were allowed to stay at the DOJ for so long. I mean, buried in this story is the little factoid that one of the people who was doing all of this, again, this person, Sanjay Patel, was still working for the DOJ all the way up until Monday, which is kind of crazy and does demonstrate the truth of President Trump's statement and the statement of many of his associates that there is, in fact, a deep state. There are people who have been lifelong appointees of various administrations who are still working inside the administration and working against the priorities of the administration. That's very real. And thank God that we have people like Harmeet Dhillon, who's now in charge of the Civil Rights Division over at the doj. I'm very, very pleased that Todd Blanche has taken over for Pam Bondi, who I thought was not good at her job. But it just goes to show you that the attempt to cleanse the administration of holdovers who are very much in the camp of Joe Biden, that is an ongoing pursuit. It's an ongoing pursuit. Now, again, the bigger message here is pretty obvious. The Democratic Party is perfectly willing to use the auspices of government to go after religious people. They've been doing it over and over and over again. This is one of the reasons that I said to my family that we ought to leave California. My great fear was and remains that states like California are effectively going to quasi criminalize religious practice by essentially saying that any 501C3 that receives tax exempt status from the state government must buy into left wing social agenda. And I think that if the Democrats were able to take over the Supreme Court, they would get away with that. They would be able to use anti discrimination law as a guise for cracking down on First Amendment religiously protected activity. That is the direction that Democrats would love to move. And if left to their own devices, they absolutely would be able to do it. If the Democrats had won in 2024, Kamala Harris would have attempted to stack the Supreme Court. If Kamala Harris had won in 2024, state governments everywhere would be pursuing anti religious activity just like this. The Biden administration was in my opinion the worst administration in modern American history. Worse even than Obama because Obama didn't say the quiet part out loud. Biden said the quiet part out loud. He just did all this sort of stuff, which is again astonishing. Now there are questions from members of the chat here saying can government workers be prosecuted? And the answer is it depends on what statute they violated. As always, that's always the big question. Will there be full investigations? I assume that the DOJ isn't just gonna leave this alone, that if there's violation of law, there will be prosecutions that follow. But it is a good reminder in a time when the President is currently fighting with the Pope, it is a good reminder that the Republican President has significantly more in common with the Pope on key issues than the Democrats do. And I know that there are a lot of top level members of the Catholic Church who want to play halvesies politically in the United States. But when it comes right down to it, the priorities of the Catholic Church, for example, are much more in line with the priorities of the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. Which is why the radicalism of the Democratic Party drove Catholic voters in droves out for President Trump. So these sort of newfangled attempt by the left to divide Catholics off from the Republican Party, the reason that's not going to work is because the Democratic Party is the abortion party, not the safe, legal and rare party, the shout your abortion party. Right? That is the thing that they are actually attempting to push the trans the kids party. Again, if Catholics are forced to choose between the trans the kids, abortions for everybody party, use the DOJ to target pro lifers party, target the little Sisters of the Poor Party and a Republican Party led by Donald Trump, who says untoward things on social media. I don't think that that's a hard decision for most Catholics in the United States. Again, this will be of relevance when we talk about the current sort of rhetorical battle between the president and the pope in short order. By the way, we'll be joined by the reporter on this story, Mary Margaret Olihan, who is our White House reporter. 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That's E X P R-S vpn.com Ben Meanwhile, just going to point out that yesterday, in brief, we discussed the President of the United States putting out an image of him that appeared to be him as Jesus. He later said that he thought it was a picture of him as a Red Cross doctor or something, which, I mean, I don't know how your Red Cross doctors dress didn't look like that to me. Again, the president loves the memory. He did take it down. I said it yesterday on the show. And then within moments, he had actually taken down the picture. Well, yesterday the President ordered doordash to the White House, which was pretty hilarious. And he talked with the doordash grandma. But then he spoke about why the image was taken down here. He was. Mr. President, did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?
