The last leader of the USSR dies and receives the endless plaudits of the media. Joe Biden visits Pennsylvania and spouts absolute nonsense. And Mexican drug cartels dominate the fentanyl market. This is the Ben Shapiro Show, and it's time to stand up against big tech. Protect your data at ExpressVPN.org/ProtectYourData. Ben Shapiro is the host of the popular conservative podcast, The Weekly Standard, and is a regular contributor to conservative publications such as Accuracy in the Middle East and The Daily Caller. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New Republic, among other publications. His work has been widely anthologized, and he was one of the most influential men in the history of Soviet politics at the time of his death in 1991, at the age of 91. This episode is sponsored by PureTalk. When you switch to PureTalk, you get the second month free when you upgrade to the next tier of the PureTalk plan. PureTalk is a company that doesn t hate your guts. They ve never made an offer of this magnitude, they ve never even made it that big before, and they re never going to make it that way again. It s not going to take you more than 10 minutes to switch from your current provider to another one, and you ll get 10% off your first month for free! Plus, you ll be saving a bunch of money with PureTalk! You ve never been paying too much for all the things you need for that plan, right for you and your family, plus they ll give you the best of that plan for the right plan for you AND your family gets it that you ve never needed it for that chance to be in the best service, too that you ll actually get that chance for that service too, too you get it, too they say it too, it s not even that chance, too, they actually gets it, they say that too, you re not even it, you say it, she s got it, he says it, right you actually gets that whole thing, right it s gonna be that place, you actually says it all, you won t even needs it, so you actually has it, that s not that thing, he s not gonna be it, you actually doesn t need the service, right he s gonna give you that right, you know that, you ve got it? That s it.
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00:01:23.000Well, yesterday, Mikhail Gorbachev, who was the last leader of the Soviet Union before its collapse, died at the age of 91, and the media have been just feeding him.
00:01:31.000I mean, we are talking the obituaries that would normally be due to a figure like, say, Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr., they are being piled on Mikhail Gorbachev.
00:01:40.000The reason for that is because Mikhail Gorbachev, again, Basically made two decisions.
00:01:46.000One was a giant mistake and the other he deserves some plaudits for.
00:01:49.000The giant mistake was believing that he could allow cracks in the facade of the Soviet Union without the entire system collapsing underneath him.
00:01:55.000And the thing that he deserves plaudits for is not starting a nuclear war at the very end of the Soviet Union's existence.
00:01:59.000Those were basically the two things that he did.
00:02:01.000And the media instead are treating him as sort of an ideological hero, as though he quote-unquote ended the Cold War.
00:02:06.000Mikhail Gorbachev by himself would not have ended the Cold War.
00:02:11.000Mikhail Gorbachev is and was a Leninist.
00:02:13.000If you read everything that he ever wrote, he was a devotee of Marxism.
00:02:17.000He never stopped being a devotee of Marxism.
00:02:19.000All that happened in the latter days of Mikhail Gorbachev is that he suddenly recognized that the Soviet Union was too weak to actually prop up this vast sphere of empire, and he started to essentially allow people to make their own decisions without full-on military intervention.
00:02:34.000But that was actually a late development.
00:02:36.000In 1986, 1985, 1986, by the time Mikhail Gorbachev actually took over, His early moves were actually quite repressive.
00:02:43.000The notion that Mikhail Gorbachev was a humanitarian in some way is not the case.
00:02:48.000And it seems to me that one of the reasons that the media are massaging Mikhail Gorbachev's legacy here after his death is because, and this happened at the time, they don't want to give credit to the actual heroes of the anti-communist movement.
00:02:59.000People like Margaret Thatcher, people like Ronald Reagan, people like Pope John Paul II.
00:03:03.000They don't want to give credit to the actual anti-communists who fought communism each and every day.
00:03:07.000Instead, they would prefer to believe that the Soviet Union sort of was always And at the very end, their heart showed through when they saw that the empire could not survive.
00:03:16.000They simply allowed it to collapse out of the decency and warmth of their own heart.
00:03:20.000And you can see that in the coverage from CNN and the New York Times.
00:03:23.000Here's CNN's obituary for Mikhail Gorbachev.
00:03:25.000It said, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the former Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, has died at the age of 91.
00:03:31.000Gorbachev died after a long illness, Russian state news agencies reported.
00:03:34.000Apparently, the man credited with introducing key political and economic reforms to the USSR and helping to end the Cold War had been in failing health for some time.
00:03:43.000Again, when we say that he helped end the Cold War, what we mean is that he read the writing on the wall, and then he made the mistake of allowing cracks to appear in a very, very weak facade, and the entire thing fell away.
00:03:54.000The lesson, by the way, that was learned by the Chinese from watching Mikhail Gorbachev is never, ever, Allow political liberalization before economic liberalization.
00:04:02.000So what the Chinese have done is they've strengthened their state apparatus while also getting involved in mercantilism via the free market.
00:04:10.000He allowed for political liberalization, at least in very, very small part, in the ring of states that surrounded the actual Russian empire.
00:04:19.000And then after that, economic liberalization took place.
00:04:21.000So allowing any sort of political break is what led to the fall of the Soviet Union.
00:04:26.000The only way, however, he could have held that up would have been on the basis of a stronger economy and the economy simply did not exist in the Soviet Union.
00:04:32.000The Soviet Union was always a bit of a paper tiger, not in the sense that they weren't militarily powerful, they were, but in the sense that they were retrograde economically.
00:04:40.000And if you actually wish to have a powerful and durable empire for a long period of time, meaning more than 70 years, then what you're going to need to do is actually build up the Communism actually forbids that, which is why China has been able to strengthen itself on the basis of capitalism.
00:04:54.000And now I think China actually is going to enter a period of economic stagnation that's going to weaken them over the course of the next couple of generations.
00:05:01.000In any case, the obituaries have been absolutely fawning about Mikhail Gorbachev.
00:05:06.000According to CNN, with his outgoing charismatic nature, Gorbachev broke the mold for Soviet leaders who until then had been mostly remote, icy figures.
00:05:15.000Almost from the start of his leadership, he strove for significant reforms so the system would work more efficiently and more democratically.
00:05:20.000Hence the two key phrases of the Gorbachev era, glasnost, openness, and perestroika, restructuring.
00:05:26.000Well, I mean, he really did not have much of a choice given the fact that the Soviet Union is already on its heels in Afghanistan, given the fact that Soviet Union was being dramatically outpaced by the United States, both militarily and economically speaking.
00:05:37.000He later said, I began these reforms and my guiding stars were freedom and democracy without bloodshed.
00:05:42.000So the people would cease to be a herd led by a shepherd.
00:05:46.000Hey, that's a bit of revisionist history, but CNN goes right along with it.
00:05:50.000According to CNN, Gorbachev had humble beginnings.
00:05:53.000He was born into a peasant family, March 2, 1931, near the Stavropol.
00:05:57.000And as a boy, he did farm labor along with his studies, working with his father, who was a combine harvest operator.
00:06:02.000In later life, Gorbachev said he was particularly proud of my ability to detect a fault in the combine instantly just by the sound of it.
00:06:06.000He became a member of the Communist Party in 1952.
00:06:09.000He completed a law degree at Moscow University in 1955, and that's when he got married.
00:06:13.000During the early 1960s, he became head of the agriculture department for the Stavropol region.
00:06:18.000By the end of the decade, he'd risen to the top of the party hierarchy in the region.
00:06:21.000Now, by the way, I should mention here that if you became the top of the party hierarchy in the 1960s in the Soviet Union, this is not because you were a wonderful person.
00:06:27.000This is because you were a both political brown noser and you had the capacity for absolute brutality.
00:06:33.000Because the Communist Party in the Soviet Union is one of the worst institutions in the history of humanity.
00:06:39.000So if you rise to the top of that, it's not because you're a wonderful, open-minded fellow.
00:06:43.000As a general rule, he came to the attention of Mikhail Suslov and Yuri Andropov, members of the Politburo, the principal policy-setting body of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, according to CNN, who got him elected to the Central Committee in 1971 and arranged foreign trips for their rising star.
00:06:58.000The next year, he was chosen as a candidate member of the Politburo.
00:07:01.000His stewardship of Soviet agriculture was not a success.
00:07:03.000I mean, no one's was, because as it turns out, collectivization is a horrible way to do agriculture.
00:07:10.000As he came to realize, the collective system was fundamentally flawed in more than one way.
00:07:13.000A full Politburo member since 1980, Gorbachev became more influential in 1982 when his mentor Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary of the party.
00:07:21.000And of course, Andropov ended up dying prematurely.
00:07:23.000He was already pretty old by the time he took over.
00:07:26.000Gorbachev began to argue in favor of an end to the arms race with the West, hoping to shift resources to the civilian sector.
00:07:32.000I mean, bottom line is that, again, he was sitting atop an incredibly rickety structure.
00:07:36.000Throughout his six years in office, Gorbachev always seemed to be moving too fast for the party establishment and too slow for more radical reformers who hoped to do away with the one-party state and the command economy.
00:07:44.000Desperately trying to stay in control of the reform process, he seemed to have underestimated the depth of the economic crisis.
00:07:49.000He also seemed to have a blind spot for the power of the nationality issue.
00:07:52.000Glasnost created ever louder calls for independence from the Baltics and other Soviet republics.
00:07:59.000The key with Gorbachev is that he was not retrograde enough as his prior predecessors had been to actually harden defense by marching troops into countries that were thinking about breaking away.
00:08:15.000He tried to engage in negotiations with Reagan, but it was Reagan who really drove the negotiations.
00:08:20.000Reagan actually sat down in 1986 in Reykjavik with Gorbachev, in which they were going to discuss getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether.
00:08:26.000And Gorbachev said, well, if you want to do that, then you also have to get rid of SDI, right?
00:08:30.000The Star Wars Initiative, which was going to be missile defense.
00:08:32.000And Reagan got up from the table and walked away.
00:08:34.000And later, Gorbachev was asked, you know, why did that summit go the way that it did?
00:08:41.000He said, we never expected that Reagan would actually get up and say no.
00:08:44.000It was all meant as sort of a front for the calming down of the military waters for the propagation of the Soviet Union into the future.
00:08:51.000In other words, it wasn't that Gorbachev wanted to end the Soviet Union.
00:08:53.000I mean, he's being treated as some sort of anti-communist reformer.
00:08:56.000He was a communist who completely misread the dealings when it came to the collapse of communism.
00:09:02.000And then, in a sort of Reversal of history.
00:09:05.000He became the hero of the liberal reform movement despite the fact that he actually was a pretty vicious communist.
00:09:12.000Natan Sharansky, who was held as an actual political prisoner in the Soviet Union for years, has a piece at the Washington Post about Mikhail Gorbachev.
00:09:20.000He says, What is perhaps surprising is that Gorbachev never achieved any sort of admiration.
00:09:24.000At home, we dissident and others in the intelligentsia, those who did not believe in the regime, who wanted change, who had even fought for decades for the very reforms Gorbachev introduced, held a more complicated view of the last Soviet leader.
00:09:35.000For one, he was a true believer in the ideas of Marx and Lenin, and the original intention behind his pioneering reforms was to rebrand communism with a more human face.
00:09:41.000Moreover, The moment it became clear that the people's desire for greater freedom could ultimately topple the regime, he did his best to restrain the forces he had unleashed.
00:09:48.000During his first trips to the West, before he became leader of the Politburo, Gorbachev discovered that the Soviet Union had paid a heavy diplomatic and economic price for its treatment of dissidents.
00:09:56.000As a result, within the first year of his ascending to power, he began to release political prisoners and longtime refuseniks.
00:10:01.000Those are Jews who are attempting to get out of the Soviet Union and get to Israel.
00:10:05.000When it became clear that such a policy could lead to mass immigration, he introduced new restrictions instead.
00:10:09.000It was only after massive American pressure, including a quarter million demonstrators convening in Washington in 1987, that the Iron Curtain first began to come down and Gorbachev began to release people.
00:10:20.000Freer immigration from the USSR led to demands by religious and national groups for self-determination Sharansky should know, because Sharansky was one of the political prisoners who was released.
00:10:29.000He sent troops to Georgia, Lithuania, and elsewhere.
00:10:31.000He killed dozens of demonstrators in the process.
00:10:33.000The dissident Andrei Sakharov, whom Gorbachev released in late 1986, and who initially appeared to be the leader's natural ally, spent the last years of his life actively fighting against Gorbachev's attempts to save the single-party system and to avoid competition in Soviet elections.
00:10:46.000Shortly before Sakharov died in 1989, he called me in Israel to say he could not visit as he had planned since he would not permit himself to leave Moscow for even a single day and potentially miss an opportunity to block Gorbachev's bid for unrivaled power.
00:10:56.000In other words, events outpaced Gorbachev.
00:11:00.000The obit for Gorbachev, again, because they're trying to deprive the actual heroes of the Cold War of their plaudits, the due plaudits.
00:11:07.000Again, I'm talking Reagan, I'm talking Thatcher, I'm talking John Paul II, I'm talking Lech Walesa, Sakharov himself.
00:11:13.000The attempt to recast Gorbachev as a kinder, gentler communist, it may have been what Gorbachev wanted to be, a kinder, gentler communist, but here's the thing.
00:11:22.000And this is why the actual hardline communists hate Gorbachev.
00:11:25.000They think that if Gorbachev had actually just done the Stalin thing and marched tanks into these dissident republics, that the Soviet Union would still exist today.
00:11:32.000One of those people who believes that, by the way, is Vladimir Putin, who calls the downfall of the Soviet Union a geopolitical tragedy, the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.
00:11:40.000A decade after the fall of the USSR, circumstances had changed, said Natan Sharansky.
00:11:45.000Participating with Gorbachev at a conference in Poland, I was asked about the forces leading to the regime's demise.
00:11:50.000In my response, I discussed three factors.
00:11:52.000Sakharov and other dissidents who fought valiantly to keep the spark of freedom alive.
00:11:55.000Western politicians like Scoop Jackson, Ronald Reagan, and Thatcher.
00:11:59.000And finally, Gorbachev, who perceived the direction of history and responded accordingly.
00:12:02.000Immediately after finishing my talk, I approached Gorbachev to thank him for releasing me.
00:12:06.000I was surprised to discover he was almost offended by my remarks, saying, quote, I released you against all advice to the contrary and you listed me only in third place.
00:12:12.000Well, I sympathized with his reaction.
00:12:14.000At the time, I felt it was more important to amplify voices of dissonance and to emphasize his role in the transition.
00:12:20.000If we look at the 20th century, however, from the bird's-eye perspective of history, we see how unique Gorbachev was.
00:12:25.000In nearly every dictatorship, there are dissidents.
00:12:26.000From time to time, there are also Western leaders willing to risk their political face to promote human rights abroad.
00:12:31.000Gorbachev was a product of the Soviet regime, but he decided to destroy it nonetheless.
00:12:34.000Well, really, what he decided to do was not launch a possible nuclear war and or massive conventional invasion of surrounding states as the Soviet Union was breaking down.
00:12:45.000George Will makes this point, and he is absolutely correct.
00:12:47.000There's a piece over at the Washington Post talking about this.
00:12:52.000He says, President Ronald Reagan, abandoning the niceties of detente, turned up the rhetorical and military temperature on Gorbachev.
00:12:58.000In 1983, he described the Soviet Union as the focus of evil in the modern world.
00:13:01.000With the Strategic Defense Initiative, that's Star Wars, he launched a high-tech challenge to a Soviet Union in which 30% of hospitals lacked indoor plumbing.
00:13:07.000Reagan sent lethal aid to people fighting the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
00:13:11.000When Gorbachev retreated, according to historian A historian named William Taubman, who wrote Gorbachev His Life and Times.
00:13:19.000According to Taubman, when Gorbachev retreated, it was the first time the Soviet Union had pulled back from territories it had liberated for communism.
00:13:27.000Apparently, according to Taubman, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster and the government's bungled response caused the scales to fall from Gorbachev's eyes regarding the comprehensive rottenness of the Soviet system.
00:13:36.000Secretary of State George Shultz in 1987 explained to Gorbachev the world's transformation from the industrial to the information age, making the foundational Marxist distinction between capital and labor obsolete because, quote, we have entered a world in which the truly important capital is human capital, where people know how freely they exchange information and knowledge.
00:13:52.000Gorbachev's lasting legacy, says George Will, might be in the lessons China's durable tyranny has chosen to learn from his and the Soviet Union's downfall.
00:13:59.000Political scientist Graham Allison observes that when Xi Jinping has nightmares, the apparition he sees is Mikhail Gorbachev.
00:14:05.000According to Allison, Xi says that Gorbachev's three ruinous errors were, quote, he relaxed political control of society before reforming the economy, he allowed the Communist Party to become corrupt, and he nationalized the Soviet military, allowing commanders to swear allegiance to the nation rather than to the party and its leader.
00:14:21.000In 1988, when the French were about to celebrate and sensible people were about to regret a bicentennial, Gorbachev impertinently lectured the United Nations, two great revolutions, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 exerted a powerful impact on the very nature of history.
00:14:35.000In other words, he was a true believer.
00:14:37.000Gorbachev said in 2006 about Lenin, quote, I trusted him then and I still do.
00:14:43.000So again, this sort of revisionist history by which Gorbachev was a communist, an anti-communist hero, is just not historically accurate and rests on the notion that it's still propagated by the left, that communism is really just a pretty extreme version of people trying to do the right thing gone wrong.
00:14:58.000And so Gorbachev is the best version of that.
00:15:01.000Whenever it comes to communism, the left seems sort of warm about it.
00:15:04.000Like, you know, they just have the right idea, but they're just going a little bit too far.
00:15:10.000But I'll tell you something that is the right idea, if you wish.
00:15:13.000To take advantage of capitalism to its fullest extent, and I mean have a successful business, you need to market the right way.
00:15:18.000Podium will help your small business stay ahead of the curve with modern messaging tools that make it easy for your customers to connect with your business.
00:15:25.000So I don't know about you, but if I get a call from a business, the chances that I'm picking that up are very, very close to zero.
00:15:30.000And the chances that I'm going to open an email from a business are also very close to zero.
00:16:24.000The real legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev, of course, is just recognizing the reality, which is that capitalism is a far more dominant system economically than communism.
00:16:35.000The real appeal of communism to most people is not, in fact, its economic dominance.
00:16:39.000Because communism is never economically dominant.
00:16:41.000The best that communism can do is redistribute resources that already exist.
00:16:51.000All it does is it takes what is there and then it just spreads it around.
00:16:54.000And that typically leads to a degradation of resources, which is why people in Cuba are still driving around Chevys from 1957.
00:17:02.000The real sort of legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev, hilariously enough, may be this Pizza Hut commercial that aired in Russia about how basically the Russians had traded communism in favor of Pizza Hut thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev.
00:17:51.000And he's happily feeding pizza to the small child sitting next to him.
00:17:57.000Man, nothing says, honestly goodness, nothing says triumph of capitalism better than Mikhail Gorbachev appearing in a Pizza Hut commercial.
00:18:07.000And in the end, that's Mikhail Gorbachev's legacy, is that the writing was on the wall.
00:18:18.000The Chinese are not going to make the same mistake.
00:18:19.000They're going to continue their reign of tyranny in order to stretch forward their ambitions.
00:18:24.000And meanwhile, On the domestic political front, Joe Biden traveled to Pennsylvania in an attempt to shore up the Senate campaign of John Fetterman.
00:19:08.000Here's the statement from John Fetterman, quote, I've been traveling the Commonwealth talking to voters about my vision and ideas for nearly a decade.
00:19:14.000I'm proud of my record as mayor and as lieutenant governor.
00:19:16.000I'm eager to put my record and my values up against Dr. Oz's any day of the week.
00:19:20.000By the way, again, he was mayor of a town of 1,800 people.
00:19:25.000And he was being paid $1,800 a year or something for that and being subsidized by his family because he's a deadbeat.
00:19:29.000As I recover from this stroke and improve my auditory processing and speech, I look forward to continuing to meet with the people of Pennsylvania.
00:19:37.000I mean, you stand with Bernie Sanders.
00:19:39.000The question is really for, at this point, how you stand.
00:19:41.000Today's statement from Dr. Aziz made it abundantly clear they think it is funny to mock a stroke survivor.
00:19:46.000No, they're simply pointing out that you are running for the Senate of the United States and you are not functional.
00:19:52.000He says, I chose not to participate in this farce.
00:19:55.000Any sense that these challenges were done in good faith is damaged.
00:19:58.000You mean a challenge to debate like in a normal political race?
00:20:01.000My recovery may be a joke to Dr. Oz and his team, but it's real for me.
00:20:04.000I will not be participating in the debate the first week of September, but look forward to having a productive discussion about how we can move forward and have a real conversation on this once Dr. Oz and his team are ready to take this seriously.
00:21:42.000Joe Biden also seems not to know the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which, I mean, you'd expect him to know that.
00:21:48.000I mean, he was actually alive for the writing of both of those.
00:21:51.000So here he was yesterday botching this one.
00:23:49.000But he just drops like casually racist stories that would get any Republican politician canceled in just a heartbeat.
00:23:54.000So here he was talking about how when he was younger, he was, I guess he had a job in a heavily black area, which means that everyone was great at basketball.
00:24:12.000Without public trust, law enforcement can't do its job serving and protecting all the communities.
00:24:18.000If I can just interject for a moment, my deceased son, Beau, he was the Attorney General of the state of Delaware.
00:24:25.000And what he used to do is go down on the east side, what's called the bucket, highest crime rate in the country.
00:24:32.000There's a place where I used to, I was the only white guy that worked as a lifeguard down in that area, on the east side.
00:24:38.000And you know where the, you can always tell where the best basketball in the state is, and the best basketball in the city is.
00:24:42.000is. It's where everybody shows up. Uh, you know, all the crime and basketball, playing basketball and lots of crime. And I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm an old white man.
00:24:58.000Joe Biden campaigning for John Fetterman.
00:25:00.000These are the politicians we have chosen for ourselves.
00:25:04.000Also, Joe Biden made the case for gun control by saying that, after all, you don't need a gun because if the government wants to murder you, they will do so with an F-15.
00:25:12.000Threatening American citizens with F-15s is definitely a way to... He's about to give a speech tomorrow, by the way, on American unity.
00:25:19.000The way apparently we are to achieve American unity is surrender your guns or he's going to napalm you.
00:25:25.000Now you can't go out and buy an automatic weapon.
00:25:30.000And for those brave right-wing Americans who say it's all about keeping America's independent and safe, if you want to fight against a country, you need an F-15.
00:25:43.000You need something a little more than a gun.
00:25:58.000Shooting at these guys with an F-15, a rifle with an F-15.
00:26:02.000By the way, his argument would be significantly more convincing if he hadn't just surrendered an entire country to a bunch of 8th century barbarians carrying AKs.
00:26:09.000We had some F-15s that we were funding in Afghanistan, and it turns out that Joe Biden ran away from those people.
00:26:15.000He ran away from a bunch of guys who had not taken a shower in three years because they were living in caves, firing old Soviet weaponry.
00:26:24.000Joe Biden, what an inspiring figure he is.
00:26:28.000There's so many wonderful things that he said during this speech in Pennsylvania.
00:26:34.000Again, I'm going to keep saying it because, again, until Republicans listen, I'm just going to keep saying it.
00:26:39.000If you're not talking about Joe Biden being an incompetent, terrible president and the fact that his candidates are similarly bad, I don't know what you're doing as a Republican.
00:26:48.000We're going to get to the Senate in a second, because again, John Fetterman in Pennsylvania is not an alive person.
00:27:03.000Here's Joe Biden yesterday after calling half of Americans semi-fascists.
00:27:06.000He says, you know, why are we talking about political violence?
00:27:10.000Did you ever think we'd come to this point?
00:27:11.000Well, I mean, I kind of thought that in 2020 when your vice president was bailing rioters out of jail on the faulty premise that America's police were systemically racist and America was rife with brutal bigotry.
00:27:22.000Here's Joe Biden talking about political violence, which apparently only lives on the right, which is weird since half the country burned down in 2020.
00:27:30.000Safer America requires all of us to uphold the rule of law.
00:27:34.000Not the rule of any one party or any one person.
00:27:49.000Did any of you think, even as old as I am, you've ever been in an election where we talk about it's appropriate to use force, political violence in America?
00:28:04.000There was talk from your side of the aisle about this.
00:28:07.000You know how you know how Joe Biden is trying to redirect?
00:28:11.000Again, the entire campaign for the Democrats is Donald Trump, Donald Trump, political violence, Donald Trump, threat to democracy, Donald Trump.
00:28:18.000Here are the, as Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air points out, Joe Biden gave this fairly lengthy speech in which he tried to speak sentences out of his face hole and failed.
00:28:28.000Here are how many times he mentioned some key terms.
00:29:26.000They were clinging to religion and antipathy to foreigners, and they were clinging to anti-trade rhetoric.
00:29:32.000Basically, they're a bunch of racist rubes. Those were all of his opponents. And then you got in 2016, Hillary Clinton suggesting that her political opponents were a basket of deplorables. You remember that one? Well, now you got Joe Biden out there suggesting that his political opponents are semi-fascists and his own Senate candidates in races that they are losing right now.
00:29:47.000Tim Ryan is losing his race against J.D. Vance in Ohio. He's out there saying, well, you know, it's not gonna be a big deal that Joe Biden called half the country semi-fascists.
00:29:53.000The president said that a portion of the Trump movement, the extreme mega philosophy, he calls it's like semi-fascism.
00:30:07.000Does that hurt you with the voters you need to win in November?
00:30:17.000If you're storming the Capitol on January 6th, if you are making bold steps to ban books and to do all of these things that are, you know, even to the point where you want to control a woman's body, to the point where if a 10-year-old girl is raped, you say that the government should mandate that pregnancy, you have a Supreme Court justice saying they want to get rid of birth control, nullify marriages, I mean, what else would you talk about?
00:30:57.000By the way, Herschel Walker, right now, according to the latest polls in Georgia, a lot of talk about how vulnerable Herschel Walker is in Georgia against Raphael Warnock, who, by the way, is a terrible candidate.
00:31:06.000The latest polls show that Hershel Walker's actually up in Georgia.
00:31:10.000He's up by a couple of points over Raphael Warnock.
00:31:12.000So everybody who's sort of surrendering the Georgia race because Walker's a bad candidate and he's not a good candidate.
00:31:17.000They're neglecting the fact that Raphael Warnock is a terrible candidate.
00:31:20.000And the only reason that Raphael Warnock is in the Senate in the first place is because Donald Trump decided to intervene in the 2020 Georgia special elections by saying that no one's vote would be counted anyway, so why bother voting?
00:31:29.000Which, by the way, is why we've had trillions of additional spending that never needed to take place.
00:31:33.000All you would have needed is for the Republicans to have won one of those Georgia seats.
00:31:39.000Meanwhile, in Arizona, another hotly fraught Senate race, Blake Masters continues to run behind Mark Kelly, but he is moderating some of his more public stances on things like election 2020.
00:32:14.000With that said, the simple fact of the matter is this is not going to be solved at the federal level.
00:32:18.000Federal legislation is not going to be brought in the United States at this point.
00:32:22.000There just is not the public approval for it.
00:32:23.000And so when you have Senate candidates running on abortion, there's a reason Democrats would like to federalize the abortion issue.
00:32:28.000It's because on a federal level, Democrats have more approval for their policies than they do on a state level.
00:32:33.000My sort of assumption is that Senate candidates and congressional candidates on the right side of the aisle are basically going to say this is a state level issue.
00:32:40.000That is what the Supreme Court has said.
00:32:41.000And so I am personally pro-life, but legislation is generally not going to be approached at the federal level on the abortion issue.
00:32:48.000It's going to be approached on the state issue.
00:32:50.000So if you want to make this an issue, you really should look at your candidates for state legislature and decide how you want to vote.
00:32:55.000Blake Masters, he continues to push on Joe Biden.
00:32:59.000So I think that if Blake Masters is going to recover in this race, it's going to be by focusing in on Joe Biden and moving away from some of the stuff that alienates voters, even if it's stuff that I happen to like.
00:33:09.000In politics, it's still a business, guys.
00:33:11.000Newsweek wrote, oh, Blake said that women and minorities are hurting the economy.
00:33:17.000Look, I don't care if every single employee at the Fed is a black lesbian, as long as they're hired for their competence and not because of what they look like or who they sleep with.
00:33:27.000We are done with this affirmative action regime.
00:33:30.000You know, I can't think of a single policy since the end of Jim Crow that's been worse or more divisive for race relations in this country.
00:34:20.000They need this because the left is going after gun rights.
00:34:22.000I mean, Joe Biden is out there saying that you don't need a gun because the government has an F-15.
00:34:25.000Well, if you are a person who is concerned about your Second Amendment rights, but you also need all the protections that come along with owning a gun, you need to be a member of the U.S.
00:34:34.000We've seen and talked about on the show good guys with guns.
00:34:36.000The problem is sometimes you can use a gun in the right way and you still get in trouble with the cops because it's not enough to legally and safely own a firearm to protect your family.
00:34:43.000To fully protect yourself and your loved ones, you have to be prepared for the mental, physical, and legal ramifications of self-defense, which is why I'm a member of the U.S.
00:34:50.000Concealed Carry Association and you should be as well.
00:34:53.000Right now, the USCCA is giving away a free concealed carry and family defense guide and a chance to win $1,000 to buy a firearm to protect yourself and your family.
00:35:04.000In their 58-page defense guide, you will learn how to detect attackers before they see you.
00:35:08.000What the USCCA has learned about school shootings, equipment, and training basics about the law and justice systems, how to responsibly own and store a gun, especially if you have little kids the way that I do, text BEN to 87222 for instant access to this free guide and enter for the chance to win a thousand bucks to put toward a firearm to protect your family, text BEN to 87222 right now.
00:35:26.000Also, the time is upon us for another backstage happening tonight 6 p.m.
00:35:31.000It's about time, because there's more news than ever to discuss.
00:35:34.000If you've never seen Backstage before, it's where I get together with my Daily Wire cohorts, including Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan, and of course, God King Jeremy, boring for a roundtable discussion on the most burning topics of the day.
00:36:11.000According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S.
00:36:12.000stocks fell for a third straight session, bringing the S&P 500's decline to 5.1% over that period, as economic data fanned investors' fears that the Federal Reserve has ample runway to continue raising interest rates aggressively.
00:36:22.000Each of the major indices declined on Tuesday, continuing a sharp sell-off in the wake of a reset in monetary policy expectations.
00:36:28.000The S&P 500 shed 44.45 points, or 1.1%, to close at 3986.16.
00:36:29.00044.45 points or 1.1% to close at 3986.16.
00:36:34.000The benchmark has seen more than $1.5 trillion of its market cap wiped out since stocks began selling off on Friday.
00:36:41.000The tech focused NASDAQ composite pulled back 134.53 points or 1.1%.
00:36:45.000The Dow Jones Industrial Average retreated 1% as well.
00:36:48.000Stocks began their descent after the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Friday the central bank must continue raising interest rates and hold them at a higher level until policymakers are confident inflation is under control.
00:36:58.000Meanwhile, while the Federal Reserve is worried about inflation, this administration is pouring gasoline on the inflation fire.
00:37:04.000Joe Biden, I cannot get over the fact that we are only a few days out from Joe Biden declaring the single most copiously profligate.
00:37:14.000Executive action in American history, 500.
00:37:17.000500 billion, with a B, dollars in student loan debt simply relieved.
00:37:47.000If that's true, that you're looking at every possible lever to bring down inflation, why go ahead with the student loan forgiveness, which is estimated to cost hundreds of billions of dollars and potentially boost demand, all of which could be inflationary?
00:38:00.000In terms of the inflation impact, I think a lot of independent analysts have looked at this and it's appropriate economically to look at the impact of not only The debt cancellation but also the restart of payments.
00:38:12.000Right now nobody is making student loan payments or very small share of borrowers are making student loan payments because there's been a pause in effect because of the pandemic.
00:38:21.000What the president announced and what we will implement is a restart of payments at the end of the year alongside the cancellation.
00:38:28.000I think that those who have looked at that including Goldman Sachs and others say that basically the inflation impact in the short term is negligible.
00:38:36.000Okay, in the short term, we were told that inflation was transitory.
00:38:42.000In the short term, it wouldn't be a big deal.
00:38:43.000We're now a year and a half into an inflationary cycle, 40-year high in inflation.
00:38:47.000Don't worry, the experts will save us.
00:38:48.000Larry Summers, who got inflation right the first time, he was out there yesterday saying, oh yeah, by the way, when you relieve student loan debt to the tune of $500 billion, half a trillion dollars, of course that's inflationary, you morons.
00:38:59.000I did not support large-scale student debt relief because I thought it was using federal resources to make transfers, hundreds of billions of dollars, and I would have liked those resources put to better use, helping people who were poorer, who were more in need, and who would use the money to invest more in the future of the economy.
00:39:29.000I think that it does add to demand, which does increase inflationary pressures.
00:39:38.000Yes, when you throw a bunch of money into the economy via giant subsidies like this, it leads to price inflation.
00:39:44.000These are shocking things to think about, except if you have a prefrontal cortex and have known that this is how the economy works always.
00:39:50.000Meanwhile, the good news is that according to Joe Biden's team, this is all part of the plan.
00:39:54.000So Brian Deese is back out there saying, you know, the slowdown, the economic slowdown that we're seeing, it's part of the economic transition.
00:40:00.000It's all part of the plan, guys, just like it was all part of the plan in Afghanistan until we just surrendered the place.
00:40:08.000We are in a transition and we certainly anticipate that as part of that transition, we will see some cooling in the rate of job growth across time.
00:40:16.000I think we have started to see that, although the labor market continues to be very strong.
00:40:21.000And it's our expectation that we'll continue to see that as well.
00:40:24.000But anytime that Americans have more job opportunities to get good jobs with higher wages, That's good news.
00:40:31.000We just have to work through this transition in a way where we can get to a stable, steady source of growth for American workers and for the economy without having to give up the economic gains that we've done.
00:40:42.000Certainly, we believe that that's possible.
00:40:44.000And we also think that the policy we're pursuing, the legislation we passed recently, will help contribute to that.
00:40:51.000Yeah, it's not going to, and one of the things that hurts him is that while he's saying this, all the numbers in the lower right-hand side of the screen are red.
00:40:58.000That makes it very difficult for him to maintain that.
00:41:00.000Meanwhile, Karine Jean-Pierre, again, being very terrible at her job, she is insisting that her quote-unquote bold climate agenda is bringing back manufacturing jobs, which is weird because we're just going to dump a bunch of money into a bunch of green projects that are not market efficient.
00:41:12.000Here she is, again, promoting inflation.
00:41:16.000Also today, First Solar, the largest U.S.
00:41:19.000solar panel maker in the United States, announced it will build a new solar manufacturing facility in the United States.
00:41:28.000These announcements will create thousands of jobs here in America, lower consumer energy costs, and cut climate pollution.
00:41:40.000Bold climate agenda and historic legislative wins are bringing manufacturing jobs back to America and turning America into a magnet for investing in clean energy manufacturing.
00:41:53.000No one believes that America is going to be a magnet for the economy by subsidizing green energy.
00:41:59.000Barack Obama promised the exact same thing, and then we created zero new green jobs.
00:42:04.000Instead, what is happening, in realistic terms, is that countries are starting to revert back to older forms of energy.
00:42:08.000So you're starting to see nuclear power plants come back online.
00:42:11.000You're starting to see Europe, for example, which is about to experience an extraordinarily bad winter because they don't have Russian oil and natural gas to power them and heat them through the winter.
00:42:18.000You've seen them start to say things like, well, you know what?
00:42:20.000Maybe natural gas actually is green-friendly.
00:42:22.000They're now reclassifying forms of energy that they said were dirty five seconds ago into clean energy in order so that they can pretend that they're not actually, quote unquote, harming the environment by using the old forms of energy that five seconds ago they said were super bad.
00:42:35.000This administration continues to pursue bad policy on nearly every single front, including on the border, by the way.
00:42:39.000Yesterday, the border patrol chief, Raul Ortiz, he said, Joe Biden is increasing the number of illegal immigrants at the border in extraordinary numbers.
00:42:47.000There are no consequences for simply violating the law.
00:42:51.000When President Biden was elected, did the number of aliens trying to illegally enter the United States increase or decrease?
00:43:03.000In my experience, we have seen increases when there are no consequences.
00:43:07.000There's an assumption that if migrant populations are told that there's a potential that they may be released, that yes, you can see increases.
00:43:19.000Open borders, high inflation, stagnating economy, cultural radicalism.
00:43:23.000If that's the combo you want, keep voting for Joe Biden's favorite candidates.
00:43:28.000If Republicans, I can't stress it enough.
00:43:32.000There was about a year and a half ago, I did a big event with House Republicans, and I said to them, at that event, if you guys somehow fail to take back Congress in 2022, each and every one of you should lose your jobs.
00:43:43.000This is a target-rich environment for conservatives, given the fact that there is unilateral Democratic control of all elected branches of government, and they are failing dramatically on every single front.
00:43:52.000It is the only thing that matters in American politics right now.
00:43:55.000If you take the referendum, Off of the Democrats and you somehow place it onto the Republicans because you pursue either radical policy items or because you decide to redirect toward the FBI and Donald Trump.
00:44:19.000So you better focus in on the people who are on the ballot and who are promulgating terrible policy all the way across the board.
00:44:24.000All right, guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
00:44:26.000You don't want to miss it because we're going to be getting into Mexican drug cartels promoting the development of a serious fentanyl crisis in the United States.
00:44:33.000The Biden administration, of course, keeping that border open.
00:44:35.000Plus, we'll get to the DOJ now saying that Donald Trump tried to hide classified materials.