Morning Wire - Friday | September 10, 2021

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

President Biden issues sweeping vaccine mandates, The White House removes several Trump-appointed officials, and China announces a ban on effeminate men on TV. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On Thursday, President Biden announced a COVID vaccine mandate for all U.S. companies with 100 employees or more. I'm announcing that the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees that together employ over 80 million workers to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated. The announcement is part of the Biden administration's aggressive new plan to pressure more Americans to get vaccinated. But how does the president plan to enforce this mandate? And what else is in his new COVID plan? I'm John Bickley with Georgia Howl. It's Friday, September 10th, and this is Morning Wire. Several federal officials appointed by former President Trump received a letter from the Biden White House this week,

telling them to submit their resignation by the end of the day, or their position with key government boards would be terminated. Which officials were targeted and how are they responding? And China's broadcasting regulators have announced a new ban on effeminate men on TV. How does China plan to impose this policy? And what does it tell us about China's priorities? Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.

This show is sponsored by MyBooky. It's winning season at MyBooky, and that means placing bets on NFL games has never been more profitable. Head to MyBooky.ag and choose from a variety of boosts, contest, and promotions up for grabs and use promo code wire to double your first deposit and your winnings. President Biden announced Thursday that more than 80 million private sector American workers will be required to get a COVID vaccine or test negative at least once a week. The announcement is part of the Biden administration's new six-point plan to compel Americans to

get vaccinated to stop the spread of the Delta variant. Daily Wire investigative reporter Marade Allardy has the details for us. So, Marade, the federal government is now going to mandate the COVID vaccine for private sector workers. That's correct. President Biden has directed his labor department to come up with a sweeping new vaccine mandate rule for private employers. This is an unprecedented move, correct? Right, it is. We haven't seen anything quite like this before.

This is the federal government inserting itself into how private companies handle COVID vaccinations. This is the first mandate of its kind for COVID. How does the administration plan to enforce this? Well, Biden's rule will force all employers with more than 100 workers to require them to get vaccinated or get tested at least once a week for the virus. Businesses that don't comply would face fines of up to $14,000 per violation. This is expected to affect 80 million American workers in the private. sector. 80 million. Does the president even have the authority to enact this kind of thing? While some legal experts think he does, like Georgetown University Global Health Law Professor

Lawrence Goston, but a flood of legal challenges are expected, and several Republican governors have already issued statements declaring that they will fight these mandates tooth and nail. George's Brian Kemp said he will, quote, pursue every legal option available to stop this, quote, blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden administration. Mississippi's Tate Reeves said the president has no authority to require that Americans, quote, inject themselves because of their employment at a private business. And the Biden administration is also mandating vaccines for federal workers, correct? That's right. Biden announced that all federal workers and even all federal contractors

must receive a vaccine or face disciplinary action. This mandate applies to not just the 2.1 million White House employees, and federal agency workers, but also the millions of contractors that do business with the government. The vaccine mandate does not apply to people who work for Congress or in the federal court system.

Really? Yeah. But the federal workers who are required to get the shot won't have the option to test out. There will be some medical and religious exemptions, but it's unclear how easy those will be to get.

So why now? I mean, what's the timing here for the Biden administration and doing something so extreme? Well, first, it's the FDA, fully approving the Pfizer vaccine. Right. And then it's Delta.

The Biden administration has pretty much blamed the spread of the more contagious delta variant on people not getting the shot. So basically, the Biden administration sees the vaccine as its key to ending COVID, and now that its FDA proved, Biden is pushing the shots as much as he possibly can. It's also worth noting that this is a significant flip-flop for Biden. The president himself said last year that coronavirus vaccines would not be made mandatory for Americans. I don't think it should be mandatory. I wouldn't demand to be mandatory, but I would do everything in my power.

It's like I don't think masks have to be made mandatory nationwide. We're bound to see some significant pushback and legal challenges to this. I'm sure we are. Thanks, Marade for the reporting. Anytime. Investigative reporter, Marade Allorty. Inflation is destroying the dollar. Birch Gold Group can help protect your IRA or 401K with a precious metals IRA.

Text wire to 989898 to claim a free info kit on physical gold and silver. There's zero obligation. Text the word wire to 989898989 to protect your savings today. The White House has sent letters to Trump appointees at numerous government boards demanding their immediate resignation. Daily Wires, Luke Roziak, broke the story on Wednesday, and he's here to tell us more. So President Biden just cleared out a lot of advisory board positions. is that normal?

Well, yes and no. Of course, every president puts his own people into the cabinet and other top positions, but this is totally different. This is a purge of small independent agencies,

governing boards, and the many advisory commissions that are across the federal government, and that's totally unprecedented. In these positions, presidents typically appoint people to fix terms like three years. And those terms are staggered

so that they don't align with presidential elections. That's by design to foster bipartisanship. So what are some positions that were affected by this. Can you give us some examples? Yeah, one is the boards that oversee the military service academies like West Point. Those are groups that have historically prided themselves in being bipartisan and for good reason. You can't have the military turned into a force pushing the politics of the day. Biden purged every single official named by Trump. The White House

suggested that they were getting rid of what they claim were unqualified appointees. Purged Service Academy board members included Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster and Sean Spicer, Naval War College graduate and former Trump press secretary. We spoke to Spicer about the forced resignations. President Obama had his picks, President Bush, President Clinton, all the way back. Not one president in the history of our nation has dismissed anybody based on that. The academies, the service academy boards, and frankly the services have been devoid of politics until yesterday. Now, the White House has tried to make it seem like most of these are well-known political figures like Spicer, but that's really not the case.

A lot of these boards are pretty in the weeds full of experts in particular niche fields. One example is a little group called the Arctic Research Commission. Trump appointed several people such as Thomas Emmanuel Danz, whose term was set to expire in 2003. Danz is a decades-long expert in the field, and he told me the commission is an independent federal agency set up by Congress. The best evidence of its political independence is actually that during the Trump administration, the commission consisted almost entirely of Obama appointees.

its chair was even outspoken against Trump. Trump didn't fire them because that would have been a pretty brazen departure from norms. Now, you mentioned that this is unprecedented, but is it illegal? For most positions, it may violate the spirit of the law, but it doesn't violate the letter of the law. But there are positions where it very well could be illegal. For example, Biden fired the general counsels of the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Those are independent bipartisan government agencies set up explicitly to have separation from presidential administrations. It's a legal gray area and it's never been tested partly because other presidents haven't done this.

So President Biden has been in office for about eight months. Why is this happening now? It's funny because initially the Biden administration tried to avoid these unusual firings by just not having committees meet. The calculus was basically, yeah, we have to conduct these operations of government. but if we have to do it with a Trump guy in the room, maybe it's better to just do nothing at all. And that was kind of an issue. I mean, there's one of these committees

is within the Department of Education and it's tasked with overseeing questions around science as it relates to schools. And that group just didn't meet all year. So this was 2021 with the school shutdowns for COVID, and the science in education board didn't meet at all? That's right. So, you know, here we have schools closed

because of coronavirus and we've got this board, who would have been well positioned to, you know, talk about this and study this. But rather than risk having a meeting where there might be a Trump appointee somewhere in the room, they said, let's just not meet at all. Wow. And that meant there was no quorum. So they couldn't meet, even though the law requires them to meet. Now, during the Trump presidency, we were warned frequently that he would do something like this.

Exactly. There was a lot of fear that Trump would, quote, violate norms and politicize the bureaucracy. In Trump's case, he retained Obama's appointees. You have to assume that what Biden's doing here is setting a new precedent, that every future president, including Republicans, is going to do the same thing. Is undermining bipartisanship and continuity a good thing for the country? Probably not. Luke, thanks for breaking the story, and thanks for coming on to share it.

Of course. That's Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak. China has been making a number of policy changes that affect the entertainment industry and how citizens consume culture. Last Thursday, it announced a ban on, quote, effeminate men on television. Here to discuss exactly what Chinese officials mean by effeminate and how this policy will play out as Daily Wire Entertainment reporter Megan Basham.

So, Megan, what exactly is this new ban? Well, you know, I think it's important to point out that the broadcasting regulators didn't just mean gay men when they issued this ban, because I think that's what a lot of people are going to hear. But depictions of homosexuality have been illegal in China since 2016. So this is really something more. What the national radio and television administration said was,

quote, TV broadcasters must resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal aesthetics. Sissy men, that's the actual quote. That's the actual quote. That's not me speaking. The Chinese government used sissy men. And then they used a Chinese slur for feminine-looking men that literally translates to girly guns. Now, one of the genres they're specifically disallowing is talent competition shows. So think American Idol. These are very popular with Chinese youth, and they often feature young male

pop stars or boy bands. And you should picture the K-pop band, BTS, very androgynous, sort of thin and delicate looking. Well, that's not the model that the Communist Chinese Party officials want their young men emulating. The idea is that effeminate men won't form stable marriages that produce children and lead to a stable society. So this ban only applies to Chinese broadcasters, obviously, but do we expect it to have any impact on American entertainment? Now, that is a fascinating question, because of course we all know that Hollywood prides itself on inclusivity

and LGBT representation. Right. But the dirty little secret is that studios don't want those, quote, unquote, gay moments to be so big that they keep them out of the Chinese market, which, if you have not heard, now the biggest movie market in the world. China's box office passed ours late last year. So typically, when it comes to movies with big international potential, studios want to keep those moments small enough and in the background enough that Chinese censors are willing to

overlook them. An example would be that very quick lesbian kiss in the rise of Skywalker in 2019. If you blinked, you missed it, and you probably didn't remember who those women were anyway. I can't say that I do. Exactly. And that was the point. Now, China didn't say that this ban will apply to movies, but it has significantly curtail the number of Hollywood movies it approved this year. So we're talking about half the usual number. And if the CCP is unwilling to let its own production companies put effeminate men in front of Chinese eyes,

well, it's highly unlikely it's going to welcome Hollywood in to do it for them. Yeah, that makes sense. It'll be fascinating to see how this plays out. Thanks for being here, Megan. Yep, my pleasure. That was Daily Wire Entertainment reporter, Megan Bastian. Another story we're tracking this week. The Biden administration is suing Texas over its new pro-life law.

The Justice Department said in a lawsuit that the bill banning most abortions after six weeks was made into law, quote, in open defiance of the Constitution. If you like this episode and are interested in hearing more, subscribe to Morning Wire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening, and give us a five-star review. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back tomorrow with the news you need to know.

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