'Ingraham Angle' on Biden's COVID narrative, Dems infrastructure bill

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South Carolina Republican tells 'The Ingraham Angle' how he will handle the infrastructure bill

This is a rush transcript from "The Ingraham Angle," July 19, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS HOST:I'm Laura Ingraham. This is THE INGRAHAM ANGLE from Washington tonight. We have a lot to get to. We have Senator Lindsey Graham, Glenn Greenwald, Victor Davis Hanson plus Raymond Arroyo with a hilarious "Seen & Unseen."

But first, "Liar Liar," that's the focus of tonight's ANGLE. Now, this weekend, it became obvious that the Biden Administration is just losing control of its COVID narrative. Remember, it was just about two weeks ago now that President Biden was close to declaring independence from the virus. But now the White House is grappling with a new reality that threatens any chance of a real recovery.

Now, of course, the focus on the Delta variant and the misplaced emphasis on tracking case numbers instead of preventing serious illness is coming back to bite them. The control freaks in L.A. County are reinstituting mask mandates.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Masking indoors must again become a normal practice by all, regardless of vaccination status, so that we can stop the trends and level of transmission we're currently seeing.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: And of course, the Far Left is hoping that's just a trend that spreads nationwide. And now other countries are announcing new restrictions to encourage vaccinations, which triggered huge protests in France over the weekend. Check this out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CROWD: Liberte.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Yes, they're saying liberte. Now, all of this sent the Dow spiraling down 700 plus points, which was happening while President Biden was touting the economic recovery.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Six months into my administration, the U.S. economy has experienced the highest economic growth rate in nearly 40 years. And we know we've - and now we knew that we needed to launch a wartime effort to get the American vaccinated and pass powerful American Rescue Plan.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Well, of course, any and all good economic news is directly tied to Trump's push for the vaccine and red state smart decisions to reopen early, along with his it was the shortest recession on history.

Now, the fact is the Democrats know that they're facing strong headwinds going into the midterms next year. And last week, we learned that they don't believe the First Amendment even applies to their critics at this point. So through their social media proxies, they seek to deep platform cancel, defame or eliminate inconvenient opinions regarding their COVID response, calling them potentially deadly misinformation.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. FRANCIS COLLINS, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH, DIRECTOR: We've got two epidemics going on right now. One of them is biological caused by a virus. The other is informational, where misinformation and intentional disinformation seems to be winning a war against truth.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Of course, in reality, it's Biden and his allies who've been the consistent super spreaders of misinformation on COVID. Now, they're still trying to force masks on children two and up. Now, reminder, there is nearly zero risk for kids with COVID. And most teachers are vaccinated. So for the Left, masks at some point, just become stage props, a sign of blind compliance. And for the young, the mandates are frankly demented and cruel.

Now, the misrepresentation on this extends to the experimental vaccine itself for kids. These emergency use approvals have been rushed with zero long-term testing. And again, teachers are vaccinated, so why frighten or pressure children, again, who face virtually no risk of serious illness. We never required flu vaccines, and the flu kills far more kids worldwide.

Now, we know there's support for school closures - speaking of misinformation - was a huge assault against children's learning and also on their social and emotional wellbeing. So anyone and everyone who supported closing schools and shutting down in-person learning should be barred from medicine and education forever.

And what about the efficacy of the vaccine itself among adults? Well, anyone else think it's weird that five fully vaccinated members of the Texas Legislature who fled to D.C. in their voting rights stunt, tested positive for the coronavirus? We have to know more about that.

And why hasn't Fauci and friends address this interesting data point in the U.K.? Britain's Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance said on Monday that 60 percent of people being admitted to the hospital have had two doses of the vaccine. He later came out and walked that back saying it was 40 percent in the hospital, who had had two COVID shots, but obviously that's still a significant number.

So why hasn't that Biden Administration addresses this? Why hasn't Collins or Fauci talked about it? Or at least put renowned vaccine expert Olivia Rodrigo on it? Of course, no misinformation roundup would be complete, though, without reminding everyone that Fauci and Collins have routinely misled America on the viral origins question.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: It makes me wonder why we would be allowing this kind of research and why would the history of lab leaks that have led to other viruses getting out, why we wouldn't have right away said - pressured the folks in China at this lab to say we need to understand what happened here. Instead of just assuming that it was coming from an animal. They tested 80,000 species they can't find one animal that carried COVID-19.

COLLINS: Again, I think the most likely explanation is still a natural transmission.

BOLDUAN: Why do you think that?

COLLINS: Let's be fair here. Because that's always been the case with other coronaviruses. So just on a historical basis, that's the most likely path that was traveled.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: I still can't believe he said that. That was a phenomenal interview, by the way. Now, he claimed he never really dismissed the lab leak theory, but an April 17, 2020 e-mail obtained from BuzzFeed that was from Collins to Fauci had the subject line conspiracy theory, that dismissed the lab leak theory.

But we all know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been conducting dangerous and controversial gain of function research, and that Collins's NIH was insane enough to funnel taxpayer money there via the group EcoHealth Alliance.

So the deluge of misinformation, disinformation coming from the White House also extends far beyond COVID. Because for political leverage, they claim that - I don't know - a few hours of criminal unrest on January 6th was itself a serious insurrection against democracy, almost as ludicrous as contending that voter ID requirements are racist, right?

And even the "Washington Post" fact checker gave Biden four Pinocchio's for his claim, which he made three times, by the way, that Georgia's Republican drafted election law had somehow shortened voting hours. It didn't.

And let's not forget, Biden lied about little things and big, including this claim that under Trump, federal contracts awarded directly to foreign companies rose by 30 percent. False - disinformation. Or the claim that his infrastructure plan would create millions of jobs when the actual estimates peg it at more like a half a million over 10 years.

Then late in June, Biden either demonstrated a shameful ignorance of the Constitution or a purposeful desire to spread disinformation as to its meaning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Oh, come on, any first year law students should know that the plain language of the Second Amendment places no restrictions on individual ownership of firearms. It's one sentence long, sir, try reading at some time.

If it's that easy for them to lie about the Second Amendment, all these other issues we pointed out, no wonder they spread misinformation about inflation. This was Biden today.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: There's nobody suggesting there's unchecked inflation on the way - no serious economist.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Wait a second. I guess, he forgot former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who has warned repeatedly about inflationary trends of a kind we have not seen in a generation. And today with a market implosion, Biden was kind of forced to reveal the actual truth.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: My administration understands that we were to ever experience unchecked inflation over the long-term, that would pose a real challenge to our economy. So while we're confident that isn't what we're seeing today, we're going to remain vigilant about any response that is needed.

As I made clear to Chairman Powell of the Federal Reserve when we met recently--

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: It's not serious, but I've talked to Powell about it. All right, and I don't even have time to get into their lies about the border not being a crisis, and the disinformation about the violent crime wave not being linked to their defund the police nonsense. Democrats should be wiped out next year just on those two issues alone in the midterms.

The fundamental problem here, the reason that Dems get away with this nonstop lying and disinformation campaign is because they never face any pushback from the corporate media. As a result, their thinking gets more duplicitous or sloppier and sloppier.

Now, at the White House, you should always be under pressure by reporters, whether you're Republican or Democrat, to get things right. Next year, when they're up against real opponents in the midterms, they're going to have wish that they've had put all Biden through the paces and that's THE ANGLE.

Here now is Dr. Harvey Risch, Yale Professor of Epidemiology, and Alex Berenson, author of "Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns"

Alex, given all these apparent breakthrough cases of COVID with individuals who have received two shots of the vaccine, it's a bit odd that Biden and his medical D team keep referring to recent outbreaks as the pandemic of the unvaccinated, primarily, correct?

ALEX BERENSON, "UNREPORTED TRUTHS" AUTHOR: Yes. No, you're absolutely correct. It's not just odd. It's simply a lie. If you look at the data out of Israel, and you look at the data out of the U.K., it's very clear that there's a massive number of cases happening in vaccinated people.

And so, the vaccine advocates have sort of fallen back on this argument that, well, it's - yes, there are some breakthrough cases, but really the serious cases, the hospitalizations, and the deaths are still happening in unvaccinated people. The problem is that that is no longer true either in either Israel or the U.K. as the - as the U.K.'s the Chief Science Adviser acknowledged today, and as Israeli data shows, clearly.

What's happening, I think, and this is something I actually warned about in the Unreported Truths 4 booklet is that the most vulnerable people are losing immunity first. So it's not that the vaccines don't have some protective effect.

It's that we never really demonstrated that the protective effect was long- term, because the trials were short term and we never really demonstrated that the protective effect was on older people, because so few older, vulnerable people were enrolled in the trials.

And now those chickens are coming home to roost, and instead of being honest about it, the Biden Administration is trying to punish people like me, trying to get people - trying to get Twitter to deplatform people like me, and attack people like you, and it's just wrong. They should be honest about what the truth is.

INGRAHAM: Dr. Risch, your reaction to that? Because, look, we want everyone to be healthy and safe and have their risk assessment done properly for themselves for their doctors, all that. But something's going on here. Something's going on here. And all they do is want to attack people who ask questions. OK, I guess they can do that. But it still doesn't answer the questions, does it?

HARVEY RISCH, YALE EPIDEMIOLOGY PROFESSOR: Well, I agree with what Alex just said. And in fact, some months ago, the CDC stopped counting breakthrough cases that weren't hospitalized, or that didn't die.

Just all the large numbers of cases in people who had been vaccinated, they stopped counting. So of course, those cases don't register for the CDC's counts since all the great proportion that they're claiming, are in unvaccinated people. And that fallacy is why the U.S. and the CDC's count is different than Israel or the U.K.. It's a fallacy.

INGRAHAM: Biden's Surgeon General Vivek Murthy spoke out about his own children today, and the vaccine. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. VIVEK MURTHY, U.S. SURGEON GENERAL: For our children under 12, and I say that as a dad, who's got two kids who are four and three. Our kids depend on us, the people around them being protected, being vaccinated. I'm worried that what we're starting to see increasingly in states like Arkansas and Missouri and Nevada and my home State of Florida, these surges within the unvaccinated population that we will continue to see that.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Alex the messages you're a bad parent, if you don't get your kids vaccinated as soon as they can get the vaccine under emergency use - you're a bad parent. That is the message you're sending.

BERENSON: Well, Surgeon General Murthy might take a look at the data from last year. The states that are seeing growth - you know, significant growth in cases are exactly the same cases - states that saw cases grow last June and July. This is a seasonal virus. We know that. It moves seasonally and that's what's happening there.

I'd like him to tell us about the $2 million that he took last year from Carnival and other companies to "consult on COVID." That's what I'd like to hear him talk about for a minute.

INGRAHAM: And Dr. Risch, again, the masking of children as we're seeing pushed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, clearly, that's going to be pressure across school systems, across the United States. Your reaction to that. Eight hours of masks on little kids.

RISCH: It's damaging to the kids, and it's all theater. There's essentially no evidence that there's benefit for the kids or for the teachers. So, I don't understand there's been 12 now studies of masking that essentially showed no benefit in every one of those studies, and yet, we're still somehow saying that masking has a benefit.

INGRAHAM: Doctors - Dr. Risch and Alex, thank you. And the attempt to restrict what information you're allowed to see is now coming from the highest office in the land.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BIDEN: My hope is that Facebook - instead of taking it personally - that somehow I'm saying Facebook is killing people, that they would do something about the misinformation - the outrageous misinformation - about the vaccine.

JEN PSAKI, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: --shouldn't be banned from one platform and not others, if you are for providing misinformation out there.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Here now a Pulitzer Prize winning and Independent Journalist Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, the biggest shock here - I don't think it's - that the modern Left thinks they can use this social media companies as their own not truth squads. But that the media seems to be just like whistling past the graveyard on this. Your thoughts?

GLENN GREENWALD, INDEPENDENT JOURNALIST: Well, I mean, I think the model was set when just weeks before the election, the Silicon Valley giants united to ban reporting done by "The New York Post" on authentic documents about the Biden family. And the media didn't raise any concerns. In fact, they supported it.

And that sent the signal that the Biden Administration, once they're in power, could use that model of suppressing information off of the internet with very little objection from the people who are supposed to defend free expression.

And the thing that's so amazing, Laura, is even if you're somebody who isn't incredibly disturbed by the idea that the government is instructing social media companies what should and shouldn't be allowed to be on the internet, these are the people least competent to judge what is misinformation.

They're the ones who spent a year saying that the theory of a COVID lab leak in Wuhan was a crazy conspiracy theory, and now they say it's highly plausible. Worse, these are the same people who flooded the country for five years with deranged conspiracy theories that Putin and the Russians had taken control over the U.S. through clandestine sexual blackmail. And now suddenly, they want to act like we should trust them to determine what is true and what is false. It's incredibly dangerous now.

INGRAHAM: Like they haven't been operating a bureau of disinformation on a multitude of issues, as I pointed out in THE ANGLE. I mean, again, when NPR, Glenn, writes an article about Ben Shapiro's site, "The Daily Wire," in this thing, they quoted Jamie Settle, Director of the Social Networks and Political Psychology Lab at William & Mary.

And she said that, "they tend to not provide very much context for the information they're providing. If you've stripped enough context away any piece of truth can become a piece of misinformation." Glenn, you can see where this is going.

GREENWALD: Yes. I mean, I think, the reality of what's going on is that these media outlets are losing their audience. Trump was kind of like a four year sugar high for them. He saved their jobs, and with him gone, their audiences collapsing. There's data today is showing that "The Atlantic," "The New York Times," "The Guardian," "Huffington Post," have all lost between a third and half of their audience in the last year alone.

Obviously, the other two cable networks combined don't get anywhere near the audience of this network. And so they look at Ben Shapiro and other Right Wing voices, and they're angry that more people want to listen to them than to these corporate media outlets.

And so their only option, instead of looking in the mirror and asking why people don't want to listen to them, is to try and just silence everybody so that they maintain their monopoly over the discourse, and everyone is captive to listen to them, because everyone else has been silenced. And that's really all it's about.

INGRAHAM: I want to get back to a point that I had made a few minutes ago. How did the Democrats - let's say, it's mostly happening right now on the Democrat side? How do they think it's actually going to help them? It's like none of these questions, whether it's about kids and masks or any of these questions are, they're not going to go away. Right.

So next year in the midterms, the questions are still going to be out there and it's better to run themselves through the paces of tough interviews tough - I mean, fair interviews, these questions. But instead of when you ask a question, you raise a point - a data point, then you're a vaccine denier, you're anti-science, you have to be stopped, it's disinformation.

I have never seen anything like this since I lived in the Soviet Union as a student in the 1980s. Glenn.

GREENWALD: It's the same mentality. I think it goes back to the 2016 campaign when they were not really so sure that Hillary Clinton was going to defeat Donald Trump, but believe they had some kind of like divine entitlement for Hillary Clinton to become president.

And when they lost, fair and square, they started asking themselves, why did we lose. And instead of looking at the mirror,. again, they started blaming everybody except themselves. And especially they started blaming Facebook, saying you allowed all this disinformation, you allowed lies about Hillary Clinton.

And our only option to survive politically, is to control the means of communication that we no longer control, which is the internet. That was the whole point of the internet - was to liberate us from not having to be manipulated and controlled by centralized authority.

When they saw that allowing that freedom jeopardizes their political interest, the only conclusion that they reach was, we can't allow that anymore. We can't allow this freedom. We need to control it, we need to silence it, we need to censor it, and through the Trump years it just escalated. And they're like this authoritarian faction now that genuinely believes that censorship is in the public good.

INGRAHAM: Yes, it is. Glenn, we're going to keep tracking it. Thank you. Great to see you tonight.

And troubling video reveals just who's trying to force their way into the country. Fox's Bill Melugin brings us a harrowing report from the border in moments.

Plus, why is the GOP granting legitimacy to a Biden infrastructure push that's going to change this country forever? Senator Lindsey Graham is here on that. Stay there.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

INGRAHAM: Now it's somewhat fallen from the front pages, but the illegal immigration crisis it's completely out of control. The federal government counted almost 190,000 people trying to cross illegally at our Southwest border into the U.S. just in June.

And if the wild video shot by Fox today is any indication, it's only getting worse. The man who captured the scene, Fox News National Correspondent Bill Melugin has the story for us tonight. Bill, what are you seeing?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL MELUGIN, FOX NEWS NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Laura, this was one of the biggest single groups that I have ever seen here at the border. We've witnessed a group of up to 400 illegal immigrants arriving at the border wall here in Del Rio today. They had hopes of being led into the United States and ultimately almost all of them were led in.

MELUGIN: Take a look at this wild video from earlier today when we were out there. Crazy scene. We were there with troopers from Texas, Nebraska and Florida as well as Border Patrol, as hundreds of migrants arrived at a closed gate in the border wall.

Now, the gate was periodically open to allow family units in. But at times, some of the adult men actually tried to squeeze through and take advantage. Troopers had the muzzle the gate closed and sometimes yell for them to get back.

Now despite the administration's repeated claims that the border is closed, Border Patrol ultimately ended up opening the gates to allow hundreds of migrants through, including large groups of single adult men, some of whom told me, they're from Ghana and Haiti.

The migrants were packed onto buses and vans and taken to processing centers that are already well over capacity. Border Patrol sources tell us it's likely many of them with asylum claims will go to ICE and then just be released into the U.S., pending their active cases.

Also here in Del Rio, Texas State Troopers arrested an active member of Los Zetas, one of the most dangerous drug cartels in Mexico. I'm told the man was dressed in camo and was found walking on a local highway. He later admitted to being a paid coyote who smuggled migrants into the United States.

And in the Laredo area today, Texas Troopers pulled over a semi-truck with 105 illegal immigrants crammed inside who are all being smuggled, the driver was arrested for human smuggling. Laura, we'll send it back to you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: Unbelievable story. Now, while our border completely breaks down, the Biden Administration has set its sights elsewhere - so called American infrastructure. But not by addressing the very real issue of roads and bridges, but rather by pouring billions into political pet projects that could fundamentally change the face of this country.

Now, earlier tonight, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer decided to move toward a final vote on the bill despite the fact that it hasn't even been written yet. Here now, Senator Lindsey Graham. Senator, the media is still calling this effort, "bipartisan." How is this bipartisan and why would a single Republican, even if you're retiring grant them the veneer of legitimacy here?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): Right. We're not going to file - we're not going to proceed to bill that's not written because that makes no sense. So if Joe Biden really wants to do infrastructure, roads, bridges, and ports, for around $1 trillion, there are plenty of Republicans who are with him. Chuck Schumer is trying to blow this effort up.

Can you imagine? You've been around town for a while here, Laura. Filing cloture on a bill that doesn't exist is insane. So President Biden, get on the phone to Schumer and tell him to stand down. Tell him that you're undercutting an effort to find common ground on infrastructure regarding roads, bridges, and ports. You can tell Schumer to stop. Whether he will or not I don't know, but you should at least try to stop him from blowing this up.

INGRAHAM: Well, Amy Klobuchar kind of gave away the game. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR, (D-MN): What you can do from infrastructure, which is not in the bipartisan package, and I'm glad they're continuing to negotiate and make progress -- what you can do is put election infrastructure in there. You could tie it to certain things as incentives for states to do same-day registration, to do the mail-in balloting.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

INGRAHAM: OK, Mail-in ballots, That's part of infrastructure. What?

(LAUGHTER)

GRAHAM: That really helps roads and bridges, right? Yes. So this is the power grab. The $3.5 trillion Democratic infrastructure package has got not a damn thing to do with infrastructure. They're wanting to put amnesty in the infrastructure bill. So you had a great story just a moment ago about a broken border. Imagine if you gave legal status to illegal immigrants without first securing the border? No proposal that's ever been made in Washington gave legal status until the border was first secured.

Joe Biden said today he wants to put amnesty in the Democratic infrastructure bill. That will lead to an invasion of illegal immigration. It will put jet fuel on a system that's already broken. If you give one person legal status, there will be a run on our border like you've never seen before. The dumbest idea in the history of the Senate, the history of the White House, it will lead to a breakdown of law and order beyond what you see today.

INGRAHAM: Well, the president is saying that these investments, Senator Graham, are going to help with inflation. Watch.

GRAHAM: They are.

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