Ben Shapiro talks about Republican primary results and why they don t bode well for the 2020 midterms. Plus, why the Supreme Court is likely to overrule Roe v. Wade, and why the Democratic Party is on the brink of taking control of the Senate. All that and much more on this week s show on The Ben Shapiro Show with Ben Shapiro! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's new show on Apple Podcasts and other podcasting platforms wherever you get your stuff. Use the promo code SHAPIRO for $1.00 off your first month and get 1 month for free when you make the switch. That s PureTalk. Puretalk is offering their best discount ever to my listeners, and it's the best deal I've ever seen! Get 1 month of Talk, Text, and Lots of Data for as little as $30 a month, plus FREE shipping on all orders over $99 a year! Subscribe and comment to stay up to date with what's going on in the world of politics, economics, and pop culture. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Tweet me if you have any thoughts or suggestions for future episodes. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What s going on with Roe v Wade? 2:30 - Why Roe Vs. Wade should be overturned? 3:15 - How to win the 2020 election? 4: What are the chances of a Supreme Court Overrule? 5:20 - Is there any chance of a Roe V Wade ruling? 6:00 7: What s happening in 2020? 8:15 9: What will happen next? 11:40 - Who s going to win it? 13:30 15:10 - Who wins the Senate? 16: Is it possible? 17:10 19:40 21:30 | What s the best chance of the future? 22:00 | Is there a Democratic majority? 26:00s 27: Is the future of the U.S. Senate 29:30says it s better than it s gonna be better than the other way? 32:40s: Does it matter? 35: Does the future have a chance of winning the Senate or not? 36:30 sores? 37:30 Is it better than that? 39:10s: Who wins it better?
00:00:00.000Republicans could lose the Senate despite getting serious electoral ground across the country.
00:00:04.000Rifts reportedly break out between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Joe Biden, and Democrats declare monkeypox a public health emergency.
00:01:31.000Alrighty, so we have a bunch of results from Republican primaries across the country, and what they are showing is sort of a mixed record of candidate selection from Republicans.
00:01:40.000This has not been a sort of major surprise, given the fact that Republicans very often nominate candidates in what are supposed to be wave years, who are kind of sketch.
00:01:50.000You remember this in 2010, there were a bunch of Republican candidates in what should have been Lean are races who seemed out of the box and then ended up losing very winnable races.
00:01:59.000Republicans have an unfortunate tendency in primaries to select the people who they think are the most passionate, the most potentially game-changing, and then those people would go on to lose the general election.
00:02:11.000Famously, William F. Buckley suggested that the art of politics when it comes to primary voting is to select the rightmost candidate who can win.
00:02:17.000And very often Republican voters forget that last part of the sentence, who can win, and they just select the rightmost candidate.
00:02:23.000This is complicated by cross currents from President Trump, because so much of American politics has now become a litmus test on loyalty.
00:02:30.000And so when President Trump attacks a candidate, very often people resonate to the candidate that Trump endorses, even if the candidate that Trump endorses isn't exactly a person who is likely to win a general election, simply because they feel the person that Trump is ripping on is not sufficiently loyal to the cause.
00:02:46.000There are all these varying sort of eddies in American politics.
00:02:49.000And what this is amounting to is Republicans blowing the chance, perhaps, to actually win back the Senate or win a broader majority in the House of Representatives.
00:02:58.000Yesterday, Nate Silver's 538 switched its projection to forecast for the first time that Democrats will actually keep the United States Senate.
00:03:04.000That is a direct result of candidate selection by Republicans in primaries ranging from places like Georgia to places like Pennsylvania.
00:03:11.000Nate Silver wrote on Twitter, it seems clear there's something happening here and movement toward Democrats in recent polls isn't just statistical noise.
00:03:17.000He says that something is probably in part or indeed mostly Dobbs, meaning the Supreme Court decision to overrule Roe versus Wade.
00:03:23.000But there are quite a few factors that have come to look better for Democrats over the past few weeks, including their legislative agenda.
00:03:29.000Silver's forecasts are based on the deluxe version of his model, which simulates the election 40,000 times to see who wins most often.
00:03:35.000This sample of 100 outcomes gives you an idea of the range of scenarios the model considers possible, according to Mediaite.
00:03:40.000In that model, Democrats now win the U.S.
00:03:44.000The GOP wins the remaining 44 out of 100 times.
00:03:47.000Now, the reality is that it's possible to overread the political trend lines to sort of green-light Democratic proposals in a way that is inaccurate.
00:03:54.000The reason that Republicans are on the brink right now is because, again, they've selected a bunch of extraordinarily weak candidates for the general election.
00:04:01.000Right now, Mehmet Oz is losing to John Fetterman, a person who has openly suggested restricting fracking in a heavy natural gas-producing state, a person who Basically could not be on the campaign trail for a couple of months here because he had a stroke.
00:04:15.000A person who has taken radical positions on nearly every topic up to and including men participating in women's sports.
00:04:21.000Oz is losing to Federman specifically because Oz is widely considered in Pennsylvania to be sort of a carpetbagger.
00:04:27.000Meanwhile, down in Georgia, Herschel Walker, who is a popular figure because of his football past but has no political experience, makes gaffes fairly frequently on the campaign trail.
00:04:37.000And unfortunately, in the middle of the campaign had a bunch of children that nobody knew about, sort of crop up.
00:04:55.000Vance, running in his first elected campaign, he is not gathering enough money right now to fight against Tim Ryan, who's a very skilled campaigner from the Democratic side of the aisle in the House of Representatives.
00:05:07.000There are a bunch of seats that Republicans really should win and that they are on the verge of losing.
00:05:11.000And a lot of that has to do with candidate selection.
00:05:13.000So this, it is possible to misread the sort of, where the buoy is on top of the waves for the tide.
00:05:22.000And they very often say with regard to climate change, that weather is not the same as climate change, right?
00:05:25.000Climate change is the broad change of the climate over the course of a hundred years.
00:05:28.000Weather is what's happening outside right now.
00:05:30.000It's very easy in politics to misread the weather for climate change.
00:05:33.000So instead of looking at the fact that there's a rainstorm and that rainstorm is being caused by bad candidate selection on the right side of the aisle, it's easy instead to say, well, that must be because there's a significant climate change toward Democrats overall in the United States right now.
00:05:46.000And that I'm not seeing a lot of evidence for.
00:05:49.000Because the fact is that the long-term trends for the Republican Party seem good.
00:05:53.000It's the short-term choices that seem pretty weak right now.
00:05:56.000To take an example, MSNBC's Steve Kornacki, who's a data analyst, he is pointing out that Hispanics are now voting Democrat by a margin of about 13 points.
00:06:27.000The trend seems to be continuing in 2022.
00:06:30.000What you're looking at here, this is the average of every poll we've got out there that's been taken over the last three months that looks at the Hispanic vote.
00:06:39.000And you put them all together, Hispanics are now voting Democratic by just 13 points.
00:06:44.000So from 38 to 21, now down in the 2022 midterm polling to a Democratic advantage of just 13 points.
00:06:53.000Okay, that is very bad news long-term for the Democrats who have relied very heavily on the Hispanic vote, breaking extraordinarily largely in their favor in, for example, senatorial, gubernatorial, and presidential elections.
00:07:03.000So the long-term trend lines with regard to Republican politics here are actually really, really good.
00:07:21.000It matters what quality material is being used.
00:07:23.000A tarp can be a thousand thread count.
00:07:25.000Depends on what kind of threads you're using, obviously.
00:07:27.000Bolin Branch uses the best 100% organic cotton threads on earth for superior softness and better nights sleep.
00:07:32.000Their sheets are buttery, breathable, impossibly soft.
00:07:35.000They only get better with every single wash. They're so good actually that in my home we took all of the other sheets in our house and literally threw them away because that's how good Bull & Branch is. Plus, they have the signature hemmed sheets. They're a bestseller for a reason. These are the highest quality threads and they fit your mattress the way they are supposed to. One of the things that bothers me is when you put the fitted sheet on the mattress and then in the middle of the night you find your face directly on the mattress.
00:07:56.000That's not going to happen with Bull and Branch.
00:07:58.000Their sheets fit the deepest of mattresses.
00:08:00.000They're labeled with top and bottom tags, so making your bed is easier than ever.
00:08:03.000Best of all, Bull and Branch gives you a 30-night risk-free trial with free shipping and returns on all of your orders.
00:08:08.000Get 15% off your first set of sheets when you use promo code SHAPIRO at bullandbranch.com.
00:08:13.000Again, that's bullandbranch, B-O-L-L, and branch.com, promo code SHAPIRO.
00:08:18.000Meanwhile, in formerly battleground states like Florida, you're starting to see significant movement away from the Democratic Party.
00:08:24.000If you look at, for example, the Miami-Dade voter registration numbers, what you are seeing is bad news for the Democrats.
00:08:31.000Between July 1st and August 1st of this year, for example, in Miami-Dade County, total registration Republicans picked up something like 3,200 votes.
00:08:39.000Democrats picked up 124 votes in that same period.
00:08:43.000So you're seeing Republican voter registration outpacing Democratic voter registration in terms of gains in very significant ways in Miami-Dade, which is a very Democratic county in Florida.
00:08:54.000If you start to see those margins coming down in places like Miami-Dade, then basically you can take Florida off the board as a potential purple or blue state for Democrats.
00:09:01.000And in fact, Amy Walter, again over at FiveThirtyEight, she's pointing out that if you look at the Electoral College right now, The Electoral College increasingly is favoring Republicans, because a lot of the states that have a lot of electoral votes are moving from purple to red.
00:09:13.000And so, theoretically, you could have a Republican candidate lose by three percentage points in the popular vote, and the Democrats still win only about 218 electoral votes.
00:09:21.000So there's some long-term trends for the Republican Party that are very good here.
00:09:25.000One of the other long-term trends here is that you're starting to see the Republican Party come back together around candidates who are well-known by their constituencies.
00:09:32.000So, for example, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has an entire piece today dedicated to the proposition that the GOP civil war in Georgia is basically over.
00:09:40.000Remember, there's a massive civil war in Georgia over Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, and this was largely based on the fact that Donald Trump was very ticked off over the fact that Georgia certified the election on behalf of Joe Biden because, frankly, there was no evidence of voter fraud sufficient to overturn the electoral results in Georgia, despite all of the fulminating by President Trump, who never actually provided the evidence in court or anywhere else.
00:10:01.000that Georgia had had gamed the election in a way that was provable in any way.
00:10:06.000Now the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is saying that Governor Brian Kemp's biggest political challenge might have hinged on whether he could win over the fractious Republican base amid an onslaught of insults from former President Donald Trump.
00:10:17.000Now the bigger question might be whether he'll earn more votes from Republicans than any other candidate on the ballot.
00:10:23.000Meaning Brian Kemp is pretty popular in the state of Georgia.
00:10:26.000He overcame David Perdue by a margin of 71 to 29.
00:10:29.000That was Donald Trump's preferred candidate.
00:10:31.000And what this again suggests that when Republicans make decisions with their head instead of sort of the knee-jerk reactionary What do I think of a candidate I've never heard of based on something that President Trump says?
00:10:41.000Because I know the media hates Trump, so if Trump likes somebody, that must mean that the person is good.
00:10:44.000Or if Trump attacks somebody, that means that the person is bad.
00:10:47.000When voters actually know the candidate that you're talking about, very often, that candidate does better than would be suggested by Trump endorsing or not endorsing in a race.
00:10:54.000So last night, for example, you had a bunch of mixed results in primaries around the country.
00:10:58.000I mean, really, really mixed results in primaries around the country.
00:11:03.000And the point I want to make here is that when you talk about whether Republicans lose the 2022 cycle or they don't perform as well as they should or whether they underperform, a lot of that is going to be misread by the media as reflecting broader trends in American politics that simply are not there.
00:11:17.000So, for example, last night in Missouri, Eric Reitens, who had run an extraordinary Trumpy campaign, he had cut an ad in which he literally said he was rhino hunting while carrying around a shotgun, pretending he was breaking into the home with SWAT officers of one of his political opponents.
00:11:33.000Eric Reitens went down to flaming defeat in that primary.
00:11:36.000He finished like a distant third in that primary to Eric Schmidt, who ended up winning that primary and will probably go on to win The Senate seat in Missouri without Republicans having to expend tens of millions of dollars to hold that Senate seat.
00:12:01.000This was very heavily focused on by Trump.
00:12:04.000Again, I think one of the problems here is that nobody actually knew the person that Carrie Lake was running against on a broad national level.
00:12:09.000This is not a particularly famous person.
00:12:12.000And so when Trump is able to intervene in close races, he's still able to tip the balance.
00:12:17.000But the notion that Trump has sort of overweening power to simply endorse And that person inevitably wins?
00:12:24.000It's more of a mixed bag here for Republicans in terms of how they pick their candidates.
00:12:27.000The rule of Trump when it comes to Trump's engagement in these primary races is if he engages in a race in which either the candidate who's being attacked is perceived as insufficiently loyal to the Republican Party or where no one knows the candidates, he has outsized weight.
00:12:42.000In races where people know the candidates and are not perceived as being loyal to the Democratic Party or as lackeys for the media, then Trump doesn't have nearly as much weight, which may hold some lessons for 2024.
00:12:52.000If Donald Trump attacks somebody who's widely liked by the Republican base, those attacks may not have the same effect as they would on a candidate who is a relative unknown, for example.
00:13:03.000Where Trump did have an effect is in potentially losing some seats that were quite winnable, right?
00:13:09.000For example, there is a race that was happening in Michigan, the third district, and that race was between Peter Mayer, who voted in favor of impeaching Trump, and a guy named John Gibbs, who's a Trump-endorsed challenger.
00:13:21.000And Trump had put Outside focus on this race because he hates anybody who voted in favor of his impeachment.
00:13:26.000Now understand that this district is a Biden plus a district is a heavy Biden district.
00:13:31.000Mayor was holding that district as a quote unquote moderate Republican who had voted in favor of impeachment.
00:13:36.000John Gibbs won that race, but the reason that he won that race is not just because Trump endorsed in that race.
00:13:41.000It's because the Democrats literally spent millions of dollars promoting John Gibbs.
00:13:46.000By suggesting in ads that he was, quote-unquote, too extreme for the state, which was a way of getting Republicans to go out and vote for him.
00:13:54.000In fact, Peter Mayer wrote an entire piece over at commonsense.news talking about this.
00:14:06.000Internal polling has us within single digits of one another, but Gibbs and I couldn't be more different.
00:14:10.000I'm a staunch defender of the Constitution and the rule of law.
00:14:12.000Accordingly, I became the first incoming freshman to recognize former VP Biden's presidential Then, three days after I was sworn into office in January 2021, I was in the House chamber when rioters overran the Capitol.
00:14:23.000A week later, I joined nine other Republicans, including Liz Cheney, to impeach then-President Trump with a heavy but resolute conscience.
00:14:28.000I'm the only freshman in history to impeach a president of his own party.
00:14:31.000Gibbs, a former political appointee in the Trump administration, denies the results of the 2020 presidential election.
00:14:36.000He's accused Obama officials of taking part in bizarre satanic rituals.
00:14:39.000He has defended anti-Semites on his now-locked Twitter account and has tweeted that Democrats are the party of Islam, gender-bending, anti-police, you racist.
00:14:46.000Since the election of Donald Trump, Democrats have claimed democracy is under grave threat.
00:14:50.000So why exactly are they funding Gibbs?
00:14:52.000They launched a $435,000 ad buy to promote Gibbs in the final days leading up to the primary.
00:14:59.000So Democrats are injecting themselves in these races to try and boost candidates who they think are going to lose on the Republican side of the aisle.
00:15:07.000And some Republicans, predictably enough, are going along with it based on their sense that if, for example, you voted in favor of impeachment, this means that they would rather lose the seat, presumably, than allow you to continue to sit in the seat, right?
00:15:18.000This is not a Liz Cheney situation where Liz Cheney is going to go down to flaming defeat in her primary and she's probably going to lose to another Republican who's going to go on to represent that district.
00:15:26.000You're talking here about a swing district in which a Republican holds a Biden district.
00:15:31.000That seat is likely to go for the Democrats at this point.
00:15:37.000It's very easy, as I say, to misread the sort of trend lines by focusing in on these individual controversial political points.
00:15:45.000The trend lines are still in favor of Republicans in the mid to long term.
00:15:48.000But Republicans can indeed blow short term elections through making mistakes.
00:15:52.000So it's easy to look at the Gibbs story and think, OK, well, Republicans, they They're facing a bunch of headwinds.
00:15:57.000Well, no, maybe they're just not picking great candidates, and that's sort of a problem.
00:16:01.000And that's why Democrats are promoting those candidates.
00:16:04.000First, some states now have laws that say that as early as the 2030 model year, new vehicles are going to have to be electric in order to be registered.
00:16:11.000Cars with internal combustion engines will only be able to get license plates if they were built before the end of the 2020s.
00:16:16.000People are going to keep repairing and driving those old cars for generations right now, which means you better maintain the car that you've got.
00:16:22.000In fact, your used car right now might be worth more than a new car straight off the lot.
00:16:26.000You need to preserve that asset by heading on over to RockAuto.com.
00:16:30.000They've been in the auto parts business for 20 years.
00:16:32.000Family-owned, their goal is to make auto parts available and affordable to keep you safe on the road.
00:16:36.000RockAuto.com's online parts catalog is incredibly easy to use.
00:16:38.000You can search all the parts available for your specific car, SUV, or truck with photos, specs, and installation tips.
00:16:43.000Not only will they have the part you need, they'll usually give you several trusted brands to choose from.
00:16:47.000RockAuto's kits are also popular because they bundle together all the parts you need for a successful repair.
00:16:51.000You don't get halfway through installing a timing belt, only to discover you actually need another pulley.
00:16:55.000Professional mechanics, do-it-yourselfers, they always pay the same at reliably low prices.
00:16:59.000Go to rockauto.com, get brakes, shocks, carpet, wipers, headlights, mirrors, mufflers, lug nuts, or any other part you need, rockauto.com.
00:17:06.000And be sure to write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us box?
00:17:10.000I'll give you an example of misreading the long-term trend.
00:17:12.000You can see the media is going to do this a lot today.
00:17:13.000So the media are very into the story from Kansas.
00:17:16.000So there was an amendment that was put on the ballot In Kansas, that essentially would have amended the constitution of the state of Kansas to get rid of the codification Roe versus Wade in the state of Kansas, right?
00:17:30.000In the state of Kansas, the quote-unquote right to abortion is protected by the state constitution.
00:17:36.000This amendment would have gotten rid of that in the state constitution and then it would have moved that back to the legislature.
00:17:42.000So the yes vote would have essentially removed this from the purview of the of the courts and moved it back into the realm of the legislature.
00:17:50.000Now, I will say that the way that this thing was phrased on the ballot is extremely confusing.
00:17:54.000It is not a particularly clear amendment.
00:17:56.000And the way that you write these amendments, everyone knows this, right, left, and center, when you write referenda for the ballot, the way that those referenda are written has a major impact on how people actually vote.
00:18:05.000But you can't overcome the simple fact that in this particular election, 60% of people of Kansas said they did not want this thing removed from the Constitution and moved back into the realm of the legislature.
00:18:17.000So this, of course, led Democrats and members of the media, but I repeat myself, To suggest that this is going to lead to a broad wave of Democratic elections across the board.
00:18:25.000That this just demonstrates the ire against the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.
00:18:29.000This is going to drive Democrats to the polls.
00:18:33.000You have to dramatically misread the data to come up with that particular conclusion.
00:18:37.000The reason you have to misread that data is because if you look at the actual voter turnout in Kansas, which was up pretty much across the board, what you see is that Republican voter turnout, because it was a primary day, was way higher than Democratic voter turnout.
00:18:50.000In the Republican primary, for example, for governor, what you see is that approximately 264,000 Democrats showed up to vote in the Democratic primary.
00:19:01.000A whopping 420,000 Republicans showed up to vote in the Republican primary, which is not a close primary.
00:19:08.000Which means 420,000 compared to 264-265,000.
00:19:12.000You're talking about, like, easily 30% more Republicans showed up to vote.
00:19:19.00020-30% more Republicans showed up to vote than Democrats, and yet the attempt to decodify Roe in the Kansas state constitution went down to flaming defeat by a margin of about 60-40.
00:19:30.000And even in areas that Trump won, Many Republicans voted in favor of retaining the quote-unquote right to abortion in the Kansas state constitution.
00:19:42.000So there are some Kansas counties that Trump won.
00:19:49.00061 to 39 people voted in favor of keeping the amendment in the state constitution that codifies Roe.
00:19:58.000So in other words, what this actually shows, so Democrats are going to say what this shows is tremendous upsurge in anger over Roe v. Wade.
00:20:06.000What this shows is that people are congenitally predisposed to maintaining the status quo in nearly every area of life, particularly controversial social issues.
00:20:14.000It also shows, you know, people are saying this is going to be transferable, this sort of passion is going to be transferable to federal levels.
00:20:20.000People are saying, well, this just demonstrates that Roe never should have been overturned.
00:20:23.000Weird, because it seems like this is a state vote to do what the state wants to do.
00:20:27.000So actually, it undercuts the idea that this is going to be a national election issue for Democrats, because it'll get sent back to the states, which is what happens when you overturn Roe, and then the states are going to get to decide.
00:20:38.000So Kansas is going to have very different laws than, say, Oklahoma.
00:20:41.000And that's sort of what the court suggested.
00:20:43.000So it's possible to overread these trends and you're going to see a lot of political commentators overread these trends in an attempt to prop up the Democratic Party long term.
00:21:05.000I think what you're going to see is basically what the polls say right now is where the polls are going to be all the way up through the election.
00:21:09.000You're going to see some candidates on the Republican side lose because they shouldn't have been nominated.
00:21:13.000You're going to see some Republicans who are kind of weak win because it's a bad year for Democrats.
00:21:19.000But what you're going to see is the media trying to convince themselves desperately that Democrats have come up with a new formula for winning by looking at particular instances of weather and then misinterpreting that as political climate.
00:21:33.000This is why Pete Buttigieg is out there on national TV talking about how when we're getting infrastructures on, this is going to change our electoral fate.
00:21:38.000Again, I think that that is whistling past the graveyard here for Democrats.
00:21:41.000Here's Pete Buttigieg trying to do it.
00:21:43.000Last week we announced a use of part of the money in order to make more transit stations accessible.
00:21:48.000A couple weeks before that we put out the first wave of airport terminal grants.
00:21:52.000We're improving 84 airport terminals around the country.
00:21:55.000It's everything that we've wanted for a long time in American infrastructure after years and years, years and years of talk.
00:22:02.000The last president talked a good game about this.
00:22:07.000And the Washington Post is pushing the same notion, right?
00:22:09.000The Washington Post is trying to push Senator Kyrsten Sinema, for example, to ram through this $433 billion environmental climate change boondoggle bill.
00:22:17.000And they say that they need to do this because, after all, this will demonstrate that they can deliver on their promises.
00:22:23.000The Washington Post editorial board says Ms.
00:22:24.000Sinema shouldn't sink this bill, most of whose contents she has indicated in the past she supports.
00:22:28.000She shouldn't sink it because she opposes closing the carried interest loophole.
00:22:32.000That provision unambiguously aids those who need most at the expense only of those who need it, not at all.
00:22:36.000But again, the Washington Post is under the belief that if Democrats do more democratic policy, this will make them more popular.
00:22:42.000And I think that they are trying to string together a series of questionable data points to come to that particular conclusion.
00:22:49.000So in other words, could Republicans blow 2022?
00:22:54.000You can always count on the Republicans to miss every opportunity.
00:22:56.000This is a thing that Republicans routinely do.
00:22:59.000But if you are using this to try and chart trend lines on behalf of the Democratic Party, I think that you are going to be sadly mistaken.
00:23:07.000Over the course of the next few years.
00:23:09.000Because again, the Democratic Party has moved too far left for the mainstream of America right now.
00:23:14.000And bad and arrogant Republican primary selections of people who are unlikely to win in the general because they get overconfident and so they nominate AOC candidates in Peter Mayer areas.
00:23:26.000Doing kind of what Democrats have done in some areas where they nominate extreme candidates to fill moderate seats.
00:23:33.000Again, bad candidate selection does not make up for the broad trend lines in American politics, which are cutting against the Democrats.
00:23:38.000So don't misread the tea leaves if you're watching this thing and determine that Democrats are therefore likely to achieve parity.
00:23:44.000Republicans, again, as I said before, Republicans can not regain the Senate.
00:23:49.000They can regain the House by, say, 15 or 20 seats as opposed to 40 seats.
00:23:54.000And all of that can be because of mistakes in how they pick their candidates.
00:23:58.000The trend lines are still the trend lines.
00:24:00.000So don't make the mistake of thinking that just because Republicans are selecting bad candidates, this spells doom for Republicans down the line.
00:24:07.000Well, meanwhile, I gotta tell you, there are a lot of people who are stifling in this summer's heat.
00:24:11.000Well, I am not, thanks to my Tommy John underwear.
00:25:13.000They've got women's stuff, all sorts of great gear.
00:25:15.000Tommyjohn.com slash Ben right now for 20% off your first order.
00:25:18.000Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi has now arrived in Taiwan.
00:25:21.000To her credit, Nancy Pelosi has always been very pro-Taiwan going back decades.
00:25:24.000According to the Washington Post, Nancy Pelosi's adversarial relationship with China was thrust back into the spotlight on Tuesday as she touched down in Taiwan as part of a congressional trip through Asia.
00:25:33.000Her visit to the self-governed island China claims as its own came in the face of threats from Beijing, as well as pushback within her own party.
00:25:38.000Her visit is a significant signal of American foreign policy from the politician second in line to the presidency.
00:25:44.000It's the first trip to Taiwan by a House speaker since Newt Gingrich did it in 1997.
00:25:48.000Beijing has sent warnings of retaliation ahead of her visit.
00:25:52.000She wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, in the face of the Chinese Communist Party's accelerating aggression, our congressional delegation's visit should be seen as an unequivocal statement that America stands with Taiwan, our democratic partner, as it defends itself and its freedom.
00:26:03.000The trip marks the culmination of a 35-year career spent as an outspoken critic of China, even when domestic issues overshadowed her foreign policy work.
00:26:10.000This week's trip to Taiwan marked a surprising bipartisan moment as Republicans joined congressional Democrats in encouraging Pelosi's travel, a notable about-face for a party that staunchly categorizes Democrats as weak on the communist country.
00:26:22.000Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and 25 other GOP senators released a statement moments after Pelosi landed in Taiwan, lauding her defiance of China.
00:26:31.000So again, on sort of an ideological level, there is No serious question that the Speaker of the House should be able to visit Taiwan, nor is there a serious question that Taiwan should be viewed as an independent country, that right now it is only the prospect of war with China that prevents Taiwan from being openly acknowledged as an independent country.
00:26:50.000China, for its part, is ratcheting up its military drills.
00:26:53.000So there's talk that they would shoot down Pelosi's plane.
00:26:54.000That, of course, was never going to happen.
00:26:56.000But according to Bloomberg, China will conduct large-scale military drills and missile tests around Taiwan in a defiant show of force after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking U.S.
00:27:04.000politician to land on the island in a quarter century.
00:27:06.000Beijing announced six exclusion zones encircling Taiwan to facilitate live-fire military drills from Thursday to Sunday.
00:27:12.000with some of the areas crossing into the island's territorial waters. The size and scope of the areas could set the stage for China's most provocative actions near Taiwan in decades.
00:27:19.000Separately, the PLA, the People's Liberation Army of China, said exercises could start as soon as Tuesday, leaving open the possibility of military activities around Taiwan while Pelosi was still on the island. The operations include long-range live firing in the Taiwan Strait and regular guided fire testing in the eastern waters off Taiwan from Tuesday evening, according to the PLA. Xi Yi, a spokesperson for the East So, two things can be true at once.
00:27:38.000quote, this action is targeted at the U.S.'s shocking recent major escalation on the Taiwan issue and serves as a serious warning to Taiwanese independence forces or those who are seeking independence.
00:27:47.000Meanwhile, the White House is trying to figure out exactly what Nancy Pelosi is even doing there.
00:27:55.000One, it should not be verboten for the Speaker of the House to visit Taiwan.
00:27:58.000Two, the Speaker of the House should have some sort of cognizable rationale for visiting Taiwan at this time if you are actually attempting to achieve something.
00:28:06.000Like, every action should be an attempt to achieve a certain effect.
00:28:09.000I'm not sure what this action is intended to achieve other than solidarity.
00:28:14.000The question is whether the expression of solidarity was necessary in order to Yes, state where the United States is on Taiwan, or as I suggested yesterday, whether Pelosi has essentially set up the United States for a fall here by making pledges that the United States is not willing to actually fulfill, which is a habit, unfortunately, for the United States government under bipartisan administrations.
00:28:35.000They make commitments to places and then they proceed to run away from those places when actual hard power is demonstrated by America's enemies.
00:28:41.000And the most recent example of this, of course, is Afghanistan, which we'll get to in just a minute.
00:28:45.000According To the Washington Post, the White House worked urgently to de-escalate tensions with China, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met Wednesday with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and other officials during a high-profile visit to the self-governing island against the administration's wishes, hoping to head off a geopolitical crisis amid threats and military maneuvers by Beijing.
00:29:03.000White House officials warned that China is preparing itself for possible aggressive actions in response to Pelosi's visit beyond this week.
00:29:09.000They reiterated forcefully that the Chinese Communist Party should not use the visit as a pretext To increase military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait.
00:29:15.000But of course, that's exactly what China is going to do.
00:29:17.000White House spokesman John Kirby, who is the National Security Council spokesperson, he said, we've seen a number of announcements from the PRC in just the last several hours that are unfortunately right in line with what we had anticipated.
00:29:28.000China has positioned itself to take further steps. We expect it will continue to react over a longer term horizon. Pelosi said, quote, we will not abandon our commitments to Taiwan.
00:29:37.000We are proud of our enduring friendship.
00:29:39.000Tsai presented Pelosi with a medal, the Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon for her work promoting US-Taiwan ties.
00:29:46.000Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security advisor, spoke with his Chinese counterpart to defend Pelosi's right to visit, but even so did not think the trip was a good idea, according to the White House.
00:29:53.000Sullivan expressed concerns about Pelosi's trip to multiple administration officials and asked for suggestions on how to dissuade her from traveling to Taiwan.
00:30:01.000And now the White House's perspective on all of this?
00:30:04.000is reflected in a piece by Thomas Friedman, the egregiously bad columnist for the New York Times.
00:30:08.000But Friedman is basically a lackey for the Biden administration.
00:30:11.000You remember that he recently wrote a piece in which he went to the White House and he sat down with Joe Biden and he talked about how Joe Biden and he were basically best friends.
00:30:18.000So what that means is that Thomas Friedman, the foreign policy columnist for the New York Times, who can be bought for a cheap meal at a third-rate hotel in a third-world country.
00:30:27.000That really is how Thomas Friedman writes his columns.
00:30:28.000He goes to a third-world country You get him a cheap meal and then he talks about the wonders of your country.
00:30:34.000But his column today is a rather fascinating window into what must be the thinking over at the White House.
00:30:39.000And it has some sort of buried leads about the relationship between what's going on in Ukraine and what's currently going on with regard to Taiwan and China.
00:30:46.000He has a piece today called Why Pelosi's Visit to Taiwan is Utterly Reckless.
00:30:49.000He says, quote, I have a lot of respect for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but if she does go ahead with the visit to Taiwan this week against President Biden's wishes, she'll be doing something that is utterly reckless, dangerous, dangerous and irresponsible, which is very strong language.
00:31:08.000These include a Chinese military response that could result in the US being plunged into direct or indirect conflict with a nuclear armed Russia and a nuclear armed China at the same time.
00:31:16.000If you think our European allies, who are facing an existential war with Russia over Ukraine, will join us if there is U.S.
00:31:21.000conflict with China over Taiwan, triggered by this unnecessary visit, you are badly misreading the world.
00:31:26.000Let's start with the indirect conflict with Russia and how Pelosi's visit to Taiwan now looms over it.
00:31:31.000says Thomas Friedman, quote, there are moments in international relations when you need to keep your eyes on the prize. Today, that prize is crystal clear.
00:31:37.000We must ensure that Ukraine is able at a minimum to blunt and at a maximum reverse Vladimir Putin's unprovoked invasion, which if it succeeds will pose a direct threat to the stability of the whole European Union.
00:31:46.000To help create the greatest possibility of Ukraine reversing Putin's invasion, Biden and his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, held a series of very tough meetings with China's leadership, imploring Beijing not to enter the Ukraine conflict by providing military assistance to Russia. And particularly now when Putin's arsenal has been been diminished by five months of grinding war.
00:32:03.000official, personally told President Xi Jinping that if China entered the war in Ukraine on Russia's side, Beijing would be risking access to its two most important export markets, the United States and the European Union.
00:32:13.000China is one of the best countries in the world at manufacturing drones, which are precisely what Putin's troops need most right now.
00:32:19.000officials tell me, China has responded by not providing military aid to Putin at a time when the U.S.
00:32:23.000and NATO have been giving Ukraine intelligence support and a significant number of advanced weapons that have done serious damage to the military of Russia, China's ostensible ally.
00:32:30.000So in other words, the Biden administration reached out to China, and under the table, they basically said to them, we need you to stop funding Russia.
00:32:36.000And China, wishing to stay out of this thing, basically said, okay, we'll stay out of this thing for the moment.
00:32:41.000So, says Thomas Friedman, given all of that, why in the world would the Speaker of the House choose to visit Taiwan and deliberately provoke China now, becoming the most senior U.S.
00:32:47.000official to visit Taiwan since Newt Gingrich in 1997, when China was far weaker economically and militarily?
00:32:57.000officials are a lot more concerned about Ukraine's leadership than they are letting on.
00:33:00.000There is deep mistrust between the White House and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine considerably more than has been reported.
00:33:06.000Okay, well, what Friedman is doing here is actually sort of fascinating because what it really means, I've said this for a while, when it comes to American foreign policy, of course there's always going to be a moral component to American foreign policy because we are advancing our interests.
00:33:18.000But advancing our interests is the morality.
00:33:20.000In other words, there's a difference between saying, as neoliberals and neocons have said for a very long time, that advancing morality in the world It's really neoliberals who have said this.
00:33:31.000The reading of neocons is a little bit strained, but neoliberals have said for a very long time, the Woodrow Wilson ideal, we spread democracy all over the world, okay?
00:33:37.000The reality is that we spread America's interests over the world, and those coincide very often with democracy, but not always with democracy.
00:33:44.000Those coincide with human rights, but unfortunately, not always with human rights, because sometimes you have to pick the best of two bad options.
00:33:51.000Real politik, which is the generalized understanding that power matters in international relations, underscores all of this.
00:33:57.000And so one of the things that Thomas Friedman says in this column is that the reason we're supporting Ukraine is not just because autocracy versus democracy or anything like that.
00:34:06.000It's because we are trying to bloody Russia's nose to prevent China from looking at this and then invading Taiwan, for example.
00:34:13.000We are trying to prevent sovereign countries from being invaded because we wish to retain the balance of power in Europe.
00:34:19.000We should retain the deterrence on NATO's borders.
00:34:22.000These are all very good real politic reasons for defending Ukraine.
00:34:25.000But the way the Ukraine war was pitched to the United States public was that we were defending a nascent democracy in Ukraine against the predations of the Russians.
00:34:32.000There's truth to that, but there are also some falsities to that.
00:34:35.000Namely, that Ukraine remains an extraordinarily corrupt place.
00:34:37.000I mean, we all used to talk about this.
00:34:39.000He used to talk about how he threatened to withhold a billion dollars in foreign aid from Ukraine unless they fired particular prosecutors that the Obama-Biden administration thought were corrupt.
00:34:50.000So, there are now riffs opening up between Vladimir Zelensky and, for example...
00:34:58.000There is funny business going on in Kiev.
00:34:59.000On July 17, Zelensky fired his country's prosecutor general and the leader of its domestic intelligence agency, the most significant shakeup in his government since the Russian invasion in February.
00:35:08.000It would be the equivalent of Joe Biden firing Merrick Garland and Bill Burns on the same day.
00:35:12.000But I've not seen any reporting that convincingly explains what that was all about.
00:35:15.000It's as if we don't want to look too closely under the hood in Kiev for fear of what corruption or antics we might see when we have invested so much there.
00:35:22.000More on the dangers of that another day.
00:35:23.000But again, the dangers of that are a pretty significant danger, are they not?
00:35:29.000In short, says Thomas Friedman, this Ukraine war is so not over, so not stable, so not without dangerous surprises that can pop out on any given day.
00:35:35.000In the middle of all this, we're going to risk a conflict with China over Taiwan, provoked by an arbitrary and frivolous visit by the Speaker of the House?
00:35:55.000He says, to be sure, there's an argument that Biden should just call Xi's bluff, back Pelosi to the hilt, and tell Xi that if he threatens Taiwan in any way, it's China that will get burned. That might work. It might feel good for a day. It might also start World War III.
00:36:05.000In my view, Taiwan should have just asked Pelosi not to come at this time. I admire Taiwan and the economy and democracy that it has built since the end of World War II. I visited Taiwan numerous times over the past 30 years, and I've personally witnessed how much that has changed in Taiwan in that time. But there's one thing that has not changed.
00:36:20.000Taiwan is still a tiny island now with 23 million people roughly 100 miles off the coast of a giant mainland China with 1.4 billion people who claim Taiwan as part of the Chinese motherland.
00:36:28.000Places that forget their geography get in trouble.
00:36:31.000He says, if we're going to get into a conflict with Beijing, at least let it be on our timing and our issues.
00:36:38.000There are a bunch of buried leads here.
00:36:40.000One of the buried leads is that we ought to start treating foreign policy with the seriousness it deserves instead of the sort of bizarre sloganeering that suggests that the reason to fight Russia in Ukraine is to preserve the possibility of gay rights in Ukraine, or the possibility of democracy in Ukraine, or because Ukraine is not corrupt.
00:36:56.000And you can't mention the fact that, for example, the Azov Brigade, which is very active in the fight against Russia, was two years ago being reported as sort of a breeding ground for neo-Nazism, right?
00:37:05.000You're supposed to ignore all of that.
00:37:08.000And the reason you're supposed to ignore all of that is, of course, because President Biden is president.
00:37:11.000If Donald Trump were president, then we would presumably be covering that in enormous ways.
00:37:15.000But what this really spells out when it comes to Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is that the United States has to get more serious about its foreign policy.
00:37:40.000There has to be a fist of steel inside the velvet glove.
00:37:43.000If you're going to bloviate, you better be able to back up the bloviation.
00:37:46.000I'm not sure that what Nancy Pelosi is doing here actually backs up the bloviation.
00:37:51.000And so, Thomas Friedman happens to be kind of correct here.
00:37:56.000And in the Biden administration's view of Nancy Pelosi's visit, happens to be, I think, rather correct.
00:38:02.000And I'm a big backer of Taiwanese independence, straight up.
00:38:05.000But there's what you back and there's what you can actually achieve.
00:38:08.000And right now that's not something that is actually widely achievable.
00:38:12.000Again, I think that it's fascinating to watch, for example.
00:38:16.000That rift breakout between Zelensky and Joe Biden.
00:38:18.000What needs to happen, by the way, in Ukraine is that Joe Biden actually needs to do the thing that any politician with stones would do.
00:38:23.000He needs to say to Vladimir Zelensky, we are going to give you enough material to make a big push before the winter, and then you're making a settlement.
00:38:29.000And I will take the blame if you can't.
00:38:31.000I understand that 80% of your public wants to keep fighting.
00:39:00.000So as it turns out, the habit of American foreign policy is to make big promises and then not fulfill them.
00:39:05.000Well, I'll tell you who's not going to make you a big promise and not fulfill it.
00:39:08.000People who are going to be credible with you.
00:39:09.000Those are the folks over at American Financing.
00:39:12.000One of the things you have to do right now is be sure that you're paying your bills at the lowest interest rates possible.
00:39:16.000This goes for your credit cards, your mortgage, just about anything, because rates are going to continue to rise throughout the year, especially on your credit cards.
00:39:22.000Those are already around 19% in just 10 minutes.
00:39:24.000You can get a free mortgage review from American Financing, learn about custom loans that can save you up to $1,000 in just one month.
00:39:30.000From flexible terms to debt consolidation, American Financing's salary-based mortgage consultants can do it all without charging any upfront or hidden fees.
00:39:38.000American Financing can help you pre-qualify for free and possibly even delay two mortgage payments.
00:39:45.000A quick way for you to bankrupt yourself and save money.
00:39:46.000And if you're looking for a free mortgage review, learn about custom loans that can save you up to $1,000 in just one month.
00:39:48.000From flexible terms to debt consolidation, American Financing's salary-based mortgage consultants can do it all without charging any upfront or hidden fees.
00:39:58.000Why not consolidate those loans, get it redone, see what your options are.
00:40:01.000And that's true for your mortgage right now.
00:40:03.000And the fact is that the rates are only going to keep going the wrong way for the foreseeable future.
00:40:41.000To watch and read the series, access the entire archive of Jordan Peterson content, head on over to DailyWirePlus.com, become a member today.
00:40:50.000Speaking of American foreign policy, in which we spoke loudly and carried too small a stick, Afghanistan is the first case in point.
00:40:56.000So, there was a lot of triumphalism yesterday from the Biden administration about the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri.
00:41:01.000That was an attempt to cover for the fact that Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in the middle of Kabul, which is the capital.
00:41:07.000of Afghanistan, which until five minutes ago was controlled by American allied forces.
00:41:12.000And now thanks to Joe Biden is controlled by the Taliban.
00:41:14.000Not only was Zawahiri killed in the middle of Kabul, he was actually killed while standing on the balcony of a house that was apparently owned by a New York Times op-ed contributor.
00:41:24.000There's a guy named Sirahuddin Haqqani, who's the deputy leader of the Taliban.
00:41:28.000The house that al-Zawahiri was killed in was owned by Sirahuddin Haqqani, who was a member of the Haqqani Network.
00:41:36.000These were supposed to be our friends and our allies, according to the Biden administration.
00:41:40.000They were going to help facilitate the fight against ISIS-K.
00:41:44.000He actually wrote a piece in the New York Times, amazing, the New York Times, which fired an opinion editor for having run a piece by Tom Cotton about the possibility of actually using the National Guard to quell riots in the United States, a widely popular position.
00:41:55.000He was not fired and nobody at the New York Times was fired for actually running an op-ed from one of the leaders of the Taliban who actively promotes Al Qaeda members and leaders living in his house.
00:42:07.000That piece was a masterwork of misdirection and lies.
00:42:15.000He said, quote, we did not choose our war with the foreign coalition led by the United States.
00:42:19.000We were forced to defend ourselves. The withdrawal of foreign forces has been our first and foremost demand that we today stand at the threshold of a peace agreement with the United States is no small milestone. We are aware of the concerns and questions in and outside of Afghanistan about the kind of government we would have after the foreign troops withdraw. My response to such concerns is that it will depend on a consensus among Afghans.
00:42:36.000We should not let our worries get in the way of a process of genuine discussion and deliberation free for the first time from from foreign domination and interference.
00:42:44.000And of course, he didn't mention the word terror anywhere in that piece, right?
00:42:49.000Like, these are just subjects that never came up.
00:42:52.000We were all supposed to just surrender Afghanistan in the hope that they would be really, really nice.
00:42:55.000And that is precisely what Joe Biden did.
00:42:57.000Well, this led to a rather awkward exchange yesterday between Peter Doocy of Fox News and John Kirby, who is the spokesperson for the National Security Council, in which Peter Doocy was like, you know, you're championing the killing of al-Zawahiri, but I noticed that you gave the entire country to terrorists.
00:43:12.000So, we know that the Taliban was harboring the world's most wanted terrorist.
00:43:19.000You guys gave a whole country to a bunch of people that are on the FBI most wanted list.
00:43:23.000What did you think was going to happen?
00:43:24.000I don't take issue with the premise that we gave a whole country to terrorist groups.
00:43:29.000I mean, again, I'd encourage you to ask... The Taliban was harboring the world's number one terrorist.
00:43:34.000How is that not giving a country to a terrorist?
00:43:38.000A terrorist sympathizing group, if not giving them permission to have terrorists just sit on a balcony.
00:43:47.000The question, I mean, Peter, the way you asked that, it makes it sound like we owned Afghanistan a year ago.
00:43:58.000That's kind of awkward, because we sort of did.
00:44:00.000I mean, with our military support, the Afghan allies were still holding Kabul, and then you did hand it over to the Taliban.
00:44:07.000But this administration did hand over the country to terrorists.
00:44:11.000The amazing delusions under which we perform our foreign policy, the big talk is really astonishing.
00:44:15.000And then it turns out that when hard power is brought to bear, and this is, I think, the point when it comes to American foreign policy generally, hard power is the name of the game.
00:44:23.000Economic power, military power, these things matter.
00:44:26.000If you're shaping a foreign policy that is designed around the idea of American ideals, you best be able to back it up.
00:44:32.000Antony Blinken trotting out there yesterday and saying that the Taliban grossly violated the Doha Agreement by hosting and sheltering Al Qaeda's top leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
00:44:42.000He said, quote, this is a statement, from the Secretary of State of the United States, quote, in the face of the Taliban's unwillingness or inability to abide by their commitments, we will continue to support the Afghan people with robust humanitarian assistance and to advocate for the protection of their human rights, especially of women and girls.
00:44:58.000Or will you turn over the entire country to a bunch of 8th century barbarians who keep women in basements, force them to wear giant sacks that reveal only their eyes, and beat them if they go to school?
00:45:09.000I feel like you're not being honest, Secretary of State Blinken.
00:45:11.000I feel like the Biden administration is not being honest.
00:45:13.000And the occasional drone killing of a high-ranking terrorist who's in the middle of a large country that the United States attacked in 2001 as a direct result of 9-11, I feel like that's a failure on your part.
00:45:28.000When people say that Afghanistan had no major impact on American foreign policy, Afghanistan had a massive impact on American foreign policy.
00:45:34.000America now has to reestablish its credibility in the world.
00:45:38.000But the problem is that reestablishing credibility, this is something I think that people need to understand from both a domestic and a foreign policy perspective.
00:45:45.000Establishing credibility means you do what you say you are going to do.
00:45:49.000It does not mean that you make big promises and then you don't fulfill them.
00:45:53.000You're better off making small promises you can fulfill than big promises that you cannot fulfill.
00:45:58.000Credibility is all about whether you're willing to back it up.
00:46:00.000In Afghanistan, we were not willing to back it up.
00:46:03.000When it comes to Ukraine, we're willing to back it up for only so long, and we'd be better off, instead of saying, this is a fight for democracy against autocracy, and that's what this is really all about, we'd be better off saying, listen, it's in America's national interest, which is good for the world, because we're the world's strongest economy, and we do stand for the spread of democracy where available, and the spread of human rights where available.
00:46:23.000I add where available there, because it's not always available.
00:46:26.000Otherwise, you end up in this weird box where you are having to move back and forth with the Saudis while simultaneously negotiating with the Iranians.
00:46:33.000And something Henry Kissinger has suggested before is that you have to be very realistic about the way that you approach foreign policy.
00:46:39.000And when you don't, you end up in rhetorical boxes of your own making, in which on the one hand, you're talking about preserving democracy in Ukraine while Vladimir Zelensky is firing all of the oversight officials in his own government, right?
00:46:50.000This is the point that Thomas Friedman is making.
00:47:38.000The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Bradford Carrington, executive producer Jeremy Boren, supervising producer Mathis Glover, production manager Pavel Lydowsky, associate producer Savannah Dominguez-Morris, editor Adam Sajevitz, audio mixer Mike Coromina, hair and makeup artist in wardrobe Fabiola Cristina, production coordinator Jessica Kranz.
00:48:03.000The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.