Former President George W. Bush speaks at the 9/11 memorial in Shanksville and compares the January 6th rioters to the September 11th terrorists. Ben Shapiro explains why he thinks Bush represents a certain sort of delusional attitude that some establishment Republicans still have with regard to politics, and why it's time for them to go away. He also points out that a lot of Americans have a sneaking fondness for the former president, and the main gripe that many people who are Bush fans have is that he spent eight years allowing everybody to attack him with alacrity, and never defending himself. Ben also notes that when he left office, he was unpopular because of the economic downturn, because like his father, he believed that ex-presidents shouldn t really be seen, and they really shouldn t be heard. And that s why they should just allow their successors to do what they're going to do, and let the rest of us do what we need to do to make sure we don't have to pay the price for our former president's incompetence. And that's why we should be grateful that he didn't run for re-election in 2016, and that we didn't have a second term, or a third term, like we did in 2004, or even a fourth term, in order to run for another term in 2016 or a fifth term in the 2016 election, which would have been better. . Ben Shapiro's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Stand up for your digital rights! Take action at expressvpn.org/standup for digital rights at expressVPN. Shout out to ExpressVPN for standing up for digital privacy at ExpressVPN at standupforyourdigitalrights.org. You can get a $5 credit when you sign up for $5 and get 5% off your first month of your first bill at $5 or $10, and you'll get $5 off your second month free! You'll know you're getting a better deal when you use promo code SHAPIRO when you shop at PureTalk at $99.99. That's $5 gets you an extra $5, you get 5GB of free 3GB of data, you'll know that you'll be getting $5 a month for a maximum of 4GB of service. you get $30 a month and you get FREE 2GB of 3GB for 4GB for a year, you won't have access to an ad-free version of PureTalk.
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00:01:57.000And he was president, obviously, for the next eight years.
00:02:00.000That was a quite defining time in my thinking.
00:02:03.000And I remember defending George W. Bush from all the people who called him Bush Hitler, and all the people who said that he lied us into war, and all the people who suggested that he was a war criminal.
00:02:11.000And the main gripe that many people who are George W. Bush fans had is that George W. Bush spent eight years being a very nice person.
00:02:19.000He spent eight years basically allowing everybody to attack him with alacrity and never defending himself.
00:02:25.000It always felt as though there were millions and millions of Americans who were out defending his policies and he was not doing a good job of defending his own policies.
00:02:32.000And then he left and when he left he was very unpopular because of the economic downturn and he essentially disappeared for years from the American political scene because like his father, he believed that ex-presidents shouldn't really be seen and they really shouldn't be heard.
00:02:45.000They should just sort of go away and allow their successors to do what they're going to do.
00:02:48.000But then George W. Bush started cropping up in places from time to time.
00:02:52.000You would see him doing an ad campaign with the Clintons and the Obamas.
00:02:54.000You'd see him hobnobbing with Michelle Obama.
00:02:57.000And every time he spoke out politically, it seemed like he was doing so in order to ding the right.
00:03:01.000It seemed as though he would never speak out with regard to the left because that would have been insulting.
00:03:04.000But he would speak out about Ted Cruz, for example, or he would speak out about Black Lives Matter.
00:03:10.000He put out a statement last year that was very sympathetic toward Black Lives Matter.
00:03:13.000And now George W. Bush showed up at the 9-11 memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to commemorate the 20th anniversary Of 9-11 and I think that George W. Bush represents a certain sort of delusional conciliatory attitude that some establishment Republicans still have with regard to politics.
00:03:31.000Now, I think that you can have worthwhile, useful discussions with people on the opposite side of the political aisle.
00:03:39.000On our Sunday special, we routinely invite people who are not of my political thinking, and we have long-form discussions about that.
00:03:45.000I may do that more than anybody else on the right.
00:03:47.000I appear on shows where people disagree with me pretty frequently, and I think it's important to do so.
00:03:52.000But to pretend that we are at a level of unity in American politics, where we simply are not, is to mistake the moment.
00:03:59.000It is to ignore where we are in American politics and frankly where we have been for a very long time because the truth is that American politics was very broken even during the Bush era.
00:04:07.000I know that we're supposed to look back and think that the world began spinning during the Trump era or during the Obama era.
00:04:13.000The reality is it did not take long after 9-11 for the left immediately to swivel and start beating George W. Bush with a hammer.
00:04:20.000It did not take long for Hillary Clinton to appear on the floor of the Senate saying, what did Bush know and when did he know it about 9-11?
00:04:26.000The implication being that the Bush administration had ignored the intelligence that would have prevented 9-11, for example.
00:04:32.000It did not take long for Howard Dean to start talking about how George W. Bush was essentially a war criminal.
00:04:38.000It did not take very long for the Democratic media To try to suggest that George W. Bush was a liar, that he was a fool, that he was attempting to lie us into war in Iraq, that he was a warmonger, and all the rest.
00:04:51.000That he had gotten us stuck in a quagmire.
00:04:56.000And George W. Bush never really seemed to understand what had happened.
00:04:59.000I think after 9-11, he was still working in the 9-11 mode because there was a transformative moment for just a moment in American politics.
00:05:06.000It's the only time I can remember it in my entire lifetime.
00:05:08.000After 9-11, there was a feeling among Americans that yes, actually there is an existential enemy out there, and that enemy is not us.
00:05:17.000We may think that the people who disagree with us on politics in America have it wrong.
00:05:20.000But there is a difference in kind between the guy who lives down the street and disagrees with you about tax law and the person who is attempting to fly a plane into a building resulting in 3,000 American deaths and the pictures of human beings jumping to their death from the 85th story of the World Trade Center.
00:05:55.000I understand the nostalgia for that moment.
00:05:57.000But to pretend that that is the underlying reality of America right now, that when you get right down to it, we still are all friends, we still all agree, we still are all on the same page, I think ignores how much has changed over the course of the last 20 years.
00:06:11.000I think it's why we are in such a dire situation.
00:06:13.000It's why I've written Three separate books now about why it seems like our unifying principles are coming apart.
00:06:19.000Principles that we actually did sort of commonly hold even in 2000.
00:06:23.000Principles about the general role of government in American life.
00:06:25.000It was Bill Clinton who was saying in the 1990s that the era of big government was over.
00:06:29.000Principles that we held about the necessity for treating other human beings as individuals.
00:06:34.000It was Bill Clinton, who in 1992 was having a sister-soldier moment, meaning he was literally saying to people that the sort of equity talk you hear from the left, the racial talk that you hear from the left today and is celebrated by the White House, was then rejected by the Democratic Party.
00:06:47.000The colorblind notions that Martin Luther King Jr.
00:06:50.000was promoting, those notions had taken predominance in American life as of 2000.
00:06:55.000That is not the case in America in 2021.
00:06:57.000There's a very serious rift in American life and in American philosophy and in American politics.
00:07:04.000That's a rift in values and I don't think George W. Bush really understands that and so what that ends with is George W. Bush At the 9-11 memorial saying something that I think it ends up he's trying to be unifying and it ends up being divisive because he doesn't understand the nature of modern America.
00:07:20.000And it's this disconnect between establishment politicians and people who are sort of in the elite coterie of American life.
00:07:28.000It's a disconnect between those folks and the rest of America that leads to the rise of populism on both the left and the right.
00:07:34.000Because at the top of the chain, there are people who are like, yeah, we understand that politics is really sort of just rock'em, sock'em robots.
00:07:40.000It's sort of as though if you're a fan of a baseball team and you watch the players on the field, you want them to be competitive with each other because you understand that something is at stake.
00:07:48.000And then somebody hits a home run, it ends the game, and the other guys go out there and they're giving each other hugs.
00:08:03.000Politics is deadly serious business when you're talking about how you impact 300 million American lives.
00:08:08.000Okay, so we'll get to what George W. Bush actually said at Shanksville in just one second.
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00:10:25.000And this is the world that George W. Bush, I think, wishes to occupy.
00:10:28.000Frankly, it's a world I wish to occupy as well.
00:10:30.000I mean, I think that what happened on Flight 93 is a great indicator of what Americans are when put to the test.
00:10:35.000George W. Bush continued along these lines, and he talked a little bit about the men and women who have served in harm's way.
00:10:42.000And you start to see the first Inklings here of why the Bush presidency, which again, I think that Bush in many ways is a man of principle, but the Bush presidency was a disappointing failure in many ways.
00:10:52.000And I think one of the reasons was because, again, he just did not defend his own policies.
00:11:19.000Instead, he has sort of comforting words for the members of the military, which is fine.
00:11:22.000But where is he when it comes to the actual serious questions of policy?
00:11:28.000Let me speak directly to veterans and people in uniform.
00:11:32.000The cause you pursued at the call of duty is the noblest America has to offer.
00:11:37.000You have shielded your fellow citizens from danger.
00:11:41.000You have defended the beliefs of your country and advanced the rights of the downtrodden.
00:11:48.000You have been the face of hope and mercy in dark places.
00:11:53.000You have been a force for good in the world.
00:11:56.000Nothing that has followed, nothing, can tarnish your honor or diminish your accomplishments.
00:12:04.000To you and to the honored dead, our country is forever grateful.
00:12:10.000That's a rather oblique critique of the Biden foreign policy in Afghanistan.
00:12:14.000OK, so if you're going to do a unity speech, then what you really need to talk about are unifying principles, right?
00:12:20.000You need to talk about what brings America together.
00:12:22.000And George W. Bush did many of those things in that speech.
00:12:26.000But if you are going to critique, then the critique has to be pointed and it has to be specific, or at least it has to be broad enough to encompass the big problems in American society.
00:12:36.000People on the right, I think, responded with the Trump era because of the Obama era, but also because of the Bush era, as we'll see in just one second.
00:12:44.000This is the clip that made all the headlines, right?
00:12:46.000It wasn't all of the talk about unity.
00:12:47.000It wasn't all the talk about bringing Americans together.
00:12:50.000It was this line from George W. Bush that brought all the commentary.
00:12:53.000This is the line where he compares the January 6th rioters to the 9-11 hijackers.
00:12:59.000We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, But from violence that gathers within.
00:13:08.000There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home.
00:13:16.000But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit.
00:13:30.000And it is our continuing duty to confront them.
00:13:35.000Okay, so, everybody took this as a critique of the 1-6 rioters.
00:13:40.000Now, it's possible to read it as a broader critique than that, right?
00:13:42.000That he's talking about white supremacists, or that he's talking about Antifa, or that he's talking about Black Lives Matter.
00:13:47.000The problem is, of course, that he released a statement in favor of Black Lives Matter last June, in which he talked about systemic American racism and all of the rest of the left-wing buzzwords.
00:13:56.000And it is also possible to say that the 1-6 rioters did something evil.
00:14:02.000I think that storming the Capitol building on the basis of a falsehood Both that the election was stolen and that the election results were capable of being overturned after having been certified at the state level.
00:14:12.000That was all a lie, that was not true.
00:14:14.000And they stormed the Capitol building to compare those people, still, to the 9-11 hijackers who literally murdered 3,000 Americans.
00:14:21.000The only American who was actually killed at the Capitol on 1-6, like died at the Capitol on 1-6 because of direct action by another human being.
00:14:28.000The only person who actually died because of that was Ashley Babbitt, right, who was shot at the Capitol and she was one of the rioters.
00:14:34.000That is not remotely the same thing as the 9-11 hijackers, either in their aims.
00:14:40.000I mean, the goal of the 9-11 hijackers was to completely overthrow the system of the United States, not because of a quote-unquote stolen election or anything like that, but because they didn't believe in elections.
00:14:50.000They believe in full-on Sharia law, right?
00:14:52.000They wanted the kind of governance that you see in Afghanistan.
00:14:56.000The comparison fails on nearly every level.
00:14:59.000But what's more important is I think George W. Bush thought that he was saying something unifying here, right?
00:15:02.000Which is that attacks on American institutions and attacks on American principles are unacceptable across the board.
00:15:07.000But the feeling that people get on the right is that he doesn't mean it across the board.
00:15:10.000And by the way, that was the feeling on the left as well.
00:15:12.000Because if the left thought that he meant that across the board, if they thought that he equally meant the one six rioters and the people who burned down American cities last summer resulting in at least $5 billion in property damage, now $2 billion of insured, if they felt that he was applying that to Antifa with the same sort of alacrity that he was applying that to white supremacists, then there might be some sort of unity, but they don't feel like that.
00:15:36.000And the reason you can tell the left doesn't feel like that is because they were giving him the strange new respect treatment.
00:15:40.000And this is what's truly going after eight years of defending George W. Bush and his policies, after eight years of going to political battle for the Bush administration on behalf I disagreed with George W. Bush a lot, and sometimes I'd critique him.
00:15:55.000But if you go back and read my columns, I defended many of George W. Bush's big moves when he wouldn't defend himself.
00:16:01.000After eight years of that, to feel as though the ex-president of the United States, who you defended, only emerges to critique one side of the political aisle, even if that side deserves critique, even if those radicals deserve critique.
00:16:13.000But he is not attempting to critique everybody.
00:16:15.000He's only critiquing a certain group, a certain radical subsection of a movement, as opposed to, you know, the people who actually destroyed his presidency at every point.
00:16:26.000And then to receive the strange respect from the same people who spent eight years declaring him a warmonger and a bad human being, that's how you get Trump.
00:16:33.000That's how you get Trump, and you deserve Trump.
00:17:28.000The core of who we are is not divided.
00:17:36.000The core of who we are is not divided, says Joe Biden.
00:17:39.000This is the part where, again, I think Bush is misreading the situation.
00:17:43.000And I think a lot of the right-wing establishment, the so-called conservative establishment, is misreading the moment.
00:17:49.000I'll explain more of this in just one second, because when Joe Biden said that he was trying to generate unity when he was inaugurated, I said at the time, we still have to define what he means by unity.
00:18:00.000By unity, does he mean they were going to attempt to come together around common principles and leave people alone, let them live their lives?
00:18:07.000Or by unity, does he mean you shut the hell up and I will tell you what to do?
00:18:10.000And it is extremely obvious at this point that Joe Biden means the latter.
00:18:13.000And if George W. Bush means the former, then unity does not mean the same thing to George W. Bush that it means to Joe Biden.
00:18:20.000And yet George W. Bush is using the exact same language, which is a dangerous thing to do.
00:18:27.000And not only that, it grants weapons to the people who actually wish to infringe upon your freedoms each and every day and divide Americans each and every day.
00:18:34.000So as you see, Joe Biden is praising George W. Bush for the unity speech, but he's really praising him because he believes that George W. Bush is attacking people purportedly of the right, but never anybody.
00:18:57.000And I don't take seriously that Joe Biden is particularly upset about January 6th because January 6th is worse in kind than the riots we saw that wrecked the cities across the summer and have led to a radically exacerbated murder rate in every major city in America.
00:19:13.000I just don't believe that he even believes that.
00:19:16.000I think that he believes that people who agree with his agenda are basically good and people who disagree with his agenda are basically bad.
00:19:23.000Kamala Harris is doing the same thing.
00:19:26.000You're granting, this is why I'm very frustrated with George W. Bush's speech, not because of the critique of one sex, but because of the inability to know and understand that radicalism on all sides of all aisles is a major, major problem.
00:19:41.000When you only critique one side of the aisle, and then you say that unity is in the offing, you are incorrect.
00:19:47.000All you're doing is granting favor to people who have actively promoted the disunity.
00:19:52.000If you're not willing to condemn all of the bad things, you're only willing to condemn some of the bad things, you're fomenting others of the bad things.
00:19:59.000The left knows this, which is why they were using Bush's speech over the weekend.
00:20:02.000Here's Kamala Harris doing the same thing, calling for unity.
00:20:04.000This is absolutely galling stuff coming from Kamala Harris.
00:20:09.000I mean, here she is calling for unity.
00:21:58.000First, let us talk about the fact that now is not a great time to go to the auto parts store because never is a great time to go to the auto parts store, right?
00:22:04.000You wait in line, you finally get to the front of the line.
00:22:05.000When you finally do get to the front to the front of the line, they ask a bunch of questions and then they're like, yeah, man, we don't have that part.
00:23:02.000And again, right, Shapiro in that, how did you hear about us, Fox, so they know that we sent you?
00:23:05.000Alrighty, so, George W. Bush calls for unity, and in the process of calling for unity, he basically name-checks the 1-6 rioters, but nothing else, right?
00:23:15.000That is where he's putting his sole focus.
00:23:17.000Which is inherently un-unifying, because it turns out that there are a lot of Threads in the fabric of America that are being torn asunder, many of them by the leadership of the United States, which George W. Bush has studiously ignored, as long as it is coming from the left, since 2008.
00:23:29.000And this is coming from somebody who voted for George W. Bush in 2004 and supported much of his agenda.
00:23:38.000It is extremely frustrating, and it's extremely frustrating to watch people who ripped him and wrecked his presidency now use George W. Bush and his statements as a tool to wield on behalf of an inherently ununifying agenda.
00:24:00.000I know you don't, because last summer, Kamala Harris was backing rioters.
00:24:03.000Last summer, Kamala Harris was tweeting out about how we could actually bail out rioters in Minneapolis.
00:24:10.000You remember her famous tweet on this, her infamous tweet on this, in which she tweeted out, if you're able to, chip in now to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.
00:24:20.000The people in jail were not protesters, they were rioters.
00:24:23.000But don't worry, she's not for uniformity, she's only for unity.
00:24:27.000My message to unvaccinated Americans is this.
00:25:29.000You have Jim Acosta, one of the most divisive media figures of the last several years, out there talking about how we can't even have unity.
00:25:35.000Why can't we have unity like we had in 9-11?
00:25:37.000We can't even have unity about masking.
00:25:38.000Right, because there are serious questions to be asked about the necessity of masking in a time when every American adult has the ability to go get vaccinated.
00:25:46.000There are serious data questions to be asked about the efficacy of particular types of masks.
00:25:51.000And there are studies that demonstrate that cloth masks against the Delta variant are not particularly effective, for example.
00:25:56.000But according to Jim Acosta, if you don't do what he wants you to do, you are threatening unity.
00:26:01.000And this is the shtick of the left, and George W. Bush played right into it.
00:26:04.000The shtick of the left is, That unity is offered by monopoly.
00:26:09.000And if you are a person who exists outside of the monopoly, then you have now created two poles, which means polarization.
00:26:15.000Polarization is a simple result, according to the left, of your failure to agree with them.
00:26:21.000The same media who are decrying lack of unity on 9-11 spent most of 9-11 trying to jabber about how COVID was like 9-11.
00:26:31.000I mean, it's certainly not like 9-11 in the sense that you guys won't even blame the people who are responsible, namely the Chinese government.
00:26:37.000But not only that, COVID's not like 9-11 because it's hit everywhere.
00:26:55.000I guess the best way to look at the two battles that the country engaged in, we had an outside invader in Al-Qaeda, and so we were able to unite.
00:27:06.000With COVID, this invisible enemy, we're not able to do it.
00:27:09.000And you know, Willie, thinking about this all week, when you actually, sadly, you look at the arc of American history, polarization in some ways is more common than us coming together.
00:27:22.000I mean, and then you get from Nicole Wallace that it's like 9-11 every couple of days COVID.
00:27:51.000But here's Nicole Wallace making that absurd comparison again, the implication being that the people who refuse to go along with the agenda here are the ones who are leading to disunity.
00:28:00.000I think there are so many parallels to how much more difficult it is to do any of the things that anyone who has spoken today has done, to call the country to a higher purpose.
00:28:10.000You've got politicians and prominent folks in the media outraged by steps that a president, not too many presidents after the one we heard from today, would try to save his country from an unthinkable death toll.
00:28:27.000I mean, as many people die every two days as died on September 11th in this country, who don't have to die?
00:28:35.000And yet there's no unity, no unity, no unity.
00:28:40.000And it's because the basic principles that used to unite the United States have gone the way of the dodo bird.
00:28:45.000They were barely there even when Bush was president.
00:28:47.000In fact, many of them crumbled while Bush was president.
00:28:51.000And this is what's so frustrating, I think, to so many people on the right watching George W. Bush's speech and looking at many in the Republican establishment who seem to feel the same way as George W. Bush.
00:29:12.000It's playing right into the hands of people who actively use unity as a guise for a uniformity.
00:29:23.000And again, I do find it galling that George W. Bush apparently only emerges to critique the perspectives of people he purports to see as on the right.
00:29:50.000And Joe Biden decided to pull out and hand the country directly back to the Taliban.
00:29:53.000And then on the 20th anniversary of 9-11, he was talking about why he was right to do so and talking about and setting up these false binaries where, I mean, it's unbelievable.
00:30:05.000He's meeting with he's meeting with first responders.
00:30:08.000And he's talking about how, you know, we really have to be circumspect in how we fight al Qaeda.
00:30:13.000If you had told anybody that we were going to spend 300 million bucks a day for 20 years to try to unite the country after we got bin Laden, after Al-Qaeda was wiped out there, can Al-Qaeda come back?
00:30:58.000Because Trump isn't having this, right?
00:31:00.000You want to know why Trump is durable in the Republican imagination?
00:31:03.000The reason Trump is durable in the Republican imagination is because Trump is not having any of this bullcrap He's not going to sit around and pretend that Joe Biden is a unifying figure.
00:31:15.000He's not going to make patty cake with the Obamas, who are highly polarizing figures in American political life.
00:31:22.000He is not going to sit around and pretend that Joe Biden is some sort of figure of great magnanimity who simply wants us all to come together.
00:31:30.000And so while normally it is sort of considered uncouth on 9-11 to talk about the failures of an administration currently in power, it becomes a lot less uncouth when you have an entire administration that has directed itself to destroying the purpose of the American response to 9-11.
00:31:46.000So when Trump just doesn't operate inside the same sphere as the Republican establishment, the Republican establishment is still making nice and doing shoulder massages with the people who are using unity as a club, and Trump's like, I'm just not going to play that game.
00:31:57.000You wonder why he's popular at the Republican base still?
00:32:00.000That is the reason he is popular at the Republican base still.
00:32:02.000Now he's not the only one who can do this.
00:32:03.000There are other people on the right who are doing this as well.
00:32:06.000You want to know why Ron DeSantis in Florida is popular with the Republican base?
00:32:09.000It's because he does this with regard to COVID in the media all the time.
00:32:11.000But the reason that Trump is popular with the Republican base is he is not going to pretend that he and Joe Biden are on the same page when it comes to things like Afghanistan.
00:32:20.000Again, it is maddening to me that Joe Biden, who spent years backing the Afghanistan campaign under George W. Bush, but then simultaneously undermined Bush at every available turn.
00:32:29.00020 years later destroys what's going on in Afghanistan.
00:32:32.000By the way, everything going on with COVID, everything going on with the budget, it is all an attempt to distract from his failure in Afghanistan.
00:32:50.000It is also a sad time for the way our war on those that did such harm to our country ended last week.
00:32:57.000The loss of 13 great warriors and the many more who were wounded should never have happened.
00:33:04.000The leader of our country was made to look like a fool, and that can never be allowed to happen.
00:33:11.000It was caused by bad planning, incredible weakness, and leaders who truly didn't understand what was happening.
00:33:20.000This is the 20th year of this war, and should have been a year of victory and honor and strength.
00:33:26.000Instead, Joe Biden and his inept administration surrendered in defeat.
00:33:34.000Okay, not only is he not wrong, he is correct about what time it is, as they say.
00:33:38.000He is correct that we don't live in a world where unity of purpose is a thing.
00:33:43.000And anybody on the left or on the right who tells you that unity of purpose in America is still a thing is missing the game.
00:33:49.000They're missing the game that is being played.
00:33:53.000In Afghanistan right now, the Taliban started flying their flag over the presidential palace in Kabul on the day of the 20th anniversary of 9-11.
00:34:01.000The white banner with the Shahada, that's the testimony written across it, was raised at an 11 a.m.
00:34:06.000ceremony on Saturday to mark the beginning of the work for the Taliban's caretaker government.
00:34:11.000The Taliban did not issue a formal statement on the anniversary of the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks that preluded them being driven from power 20 years earlier, but the image of the flag was a stunning reminder, of course.
00:34:22.000Meanwhile, The Biden administration, it now turns out, on their way out of Afghanistan, remember they had this quote-unquote successful drone attack to go after the ISIS members who perpetrated that terror attack that killed 13 Americans?
00:34:35.000Well, it turns out that in all likelihood, according to the New York Times, they did in fact kill an Afghan translator and members of his family.
00:34:43.000But they had no idea who they were hitting.
00:35:24.000They want to use the powers of the federal government to ram through anything that they can without regard for the constitutional process.
00:35:30.000They want to do it in top-down fashion.
00:35:32.000They want to completely rewrite the American national bargain.
00:35:35.000And they want to castigate all of their opponents as inherently polarizing for things like Really, you're telling me I need to mask up my five-year-old?
00:36:49.000That is 866-721-3300 or check them out at AmericanFinancing.net and see what kind of deal you can get on refinancing that home mortgage with rates this low.
00:37:04.000Alrighty, as the legacy media continues to spread their propaganda in these really difficult times, it is important you have a source you can trust.
00:37:11.000It's the daily morning news show dedicated to bringing you everything you need to know without any spin or hidden agenda.
00:37:17.000It's the only daily podcast that values your time and the truth.
00:37:20.000While we're working overtime to make sure fact-based news still has a platform, we need your help to keep Morning Wire trending toward number one.
00:37:26.000So please subscribe and start listening right now to Morning Wire on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a five star review if you like what you hear.
00:37:35.000Also, you may have noticed that what is happening in America right now is the antithesis of what the founders sought.
00:37:41.000The President of the United States has decided to go the authoritarian route and mandate vaccines for all businesses with over 100 employees or testing of all employees.
00:38:13.000That's why you should tune in to catch an all-new episode discussing what's happening and how we fight back at Backstage tomorrow with me, Jeremy Boring, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, and Andrew Klavan.
00:38:42.000They're seeking to ram through a world-breaking $3.5 trillion budget buster in the middle of a divisive news cycle with inflation at the highest rate for businesses since 2010.
00:38:55.000According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a producer price index, which monitors changes in input prices for businesses and other domestic producers, rose 0.7 percent in August, slightly beating the 0.6 percent rate predicted by economists.
00:39:06.000Inflation for businesses has now reached a year-over-year rate of 8.3 percent.
00:39:10.000That's the metric's highest level since 2010.
00:39:16.000It is also an economy that is pretty much crapping out.
00:39:19.000As you'll recall, Joe Biden's employment statistics have been pretty dire.
00:39:23.000He was supposed to hit 780,000 new jobs last month.
00:39:26.000He hit instead about 235,000 new jobs last month.
00:39:30.000But Democrats are pushing forward with their budget plan anyway.
00:39:34.000This is a budget plan that is, as the New York Times described it, cradle to grave.
00:39:39.000Here is what is in this $3.5 trillion plan.
00:39:41.000Remember, this is on top of the $1.9 trillion we spent earlier this year and the $1.2 trillion, $1.1 trillion in these so-called infrastructure bipartisan bills.
00:39:51.000So that means that if these things were all to pass this year, you'd be talking about a minimum of $6.5 trillion spent in this year, right?
00:39:59.000Or at least passed in this year and spent over the next few years because there'll be more money spent next year.
00:40:06.000Well, it would be including paid family and medical leave, subsidized child care, an extension of the expanded child tax credit, universal pre-K for three and four-year-olds despite the failures of Head Start, two years of tuition-free community college.
00:40:18.000It would also provide green cards to millions of immigrants.
00:40:20.000You may have noticed that that has nothing to do with the budget.
00:40:23.000Democrats are going to shovel that crap in there as well, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:40:26.000It would also extend Expanded ACA subsidies, Obamacare subsidies, approved earlier this year in the COVID-19 aid package.
00:40:34.000So we're just going to continue to expand emergency measures that were taken during COVID-19.
00:40:39.000The plan would broaden Medicare benefits to cover now dental, vision, and hearing, and would aim to reduce the cost of prescription drugs by allowing Medicare to negotiate prices, among other steps.
00:40:48.000Allowing Medicare to negotiate prices, of course, destroys all of the incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs in the United States in the first place.
00:40:54.000Also, Democrats are proposing a series of ideas, including tax credits for clean energy investments, and a plan resembling a clean electricity standard aimed at reducing carbon emissions in the electricity sector by 80%.
00:41:06.000Also, Democrats are proposing polluter import fees.
00:41:09.000So how exactly are Democrats going to pay for all of this?
00:41:14.000Explaining how they are going to pay for all of this.
00:41:17.000And the answer is they're going to raise taxes in a radical fashion that we have not seen for decades.
00:41:21.000The House Democrats are now proposing a plan for $2.9 trillion in new taxes.
00:41:26.000Notice that even though they're raising $2.9 trillion in new taxes, we're spending, as I said, $6.5 trillion approved in this year alone.
00:41:32.000So it still doesn't pay for any of this nonsense.
00:41:34.000And what exactly are they going to do?
00:41:36.000Well, they're going to increase the top tax rate on Americans earning over $435,000 a year from 37% to 39.6%.
00:41:44.000Also, there's going to be a 3% surcharge on top of that.
00:41:49.000And then there's going to be an NIIT, which is a surcharge on top of that.
00:41:52.000So the actual top tax bracket would go to 46% before any state taxes were actually applied, meaning that the actual state tax for people in the top income bracket in, say, California, would be nearly 60% on income.
00:42:05.000It also calls for a new corporate tax rate of 26.5% for large profitable businesses up from the current rate of 21%.
00:42:12.000This would put our corporate tax rate above China's.
00:42:15.000So it'll be fun to watch all of the businesses rush and scurry for the exits and watch the job loss that comes along with that.
00:42:26.000Many items in the new draft scale back the more ambitious tax increases sought by Biden earlier this year, but the ideas taken together amount to a significant unwinding of the tax cuts enacted by Republicans.
00:42:35.000The draft tax also included some surprises, including an expected increase in the capital gains rate paid by investors to 25%.
00:42:45.000So basically, you paid taxes on your income.
00:42:47.000You then took that income and you put it in the stock market.
00:42:49.000Now, they're going to tax any capital gains that you make from the stock market at 25%.
00:42:54.000Which, of course, is going to hurt a lot of people who have, say, pensions in the stock market.
00:42:59.000Biden's plan originally suggested approximately doubling the capital gains tax rate.
00:43:05.000Also, they're, as I say, going to have that new surtax on quote-unquote high-income individuals.
00:43:10.000Democrats are floating a tiered system for the corporate tax rate.
00:43:13.000Only firms with incomes above $5 million would pay the new 26.5% rate.
00:43:19.000Which, of course, is most businesses that hire a significant number of people in the United States.
00:43:24.000Also, the proposal is going after new tobacco taxes.
00:43:27.000So remember he said he was not going to raise taxes on people who are poor?
00:43:31.000Tobacco and nicotine taxes are directed at poor people because poor people in the United States disproportionately smoke.
00:43:38.000That proposal calls for increasing taxes on tobacco and nicotine by roughly $100 billion, while also raising $16 billion from changing rules to, quote, treat cryptocurrency the same as other financial instruments.
00:43:47.000So they're going to crack down on cryptocurrency?
00:43:49.000They have to crack down on cryptocurrency.
00:43:51.000The reason they're cracking down on crypto is because crypto is a way for people to escape the predations of the federal government inflating its own currency.
00:43:59.000The next step, presumably, will be for the federal government to create a Fedcoin, to create its own sort of digital currency, and then the federal government will take its benefits and it will directly deposit them into your bank account, and then will charge you a negative interest rate.
00:44:15.000So they'll just force you to spend it, basically.
00:44:17.000They'll do fiscal policy directly into your bank account.
00:44:28.000So this is the House Democrats tax plan.
00:44:31.000If Democrats get their way, they're going to radically increase taxes and that will have a dire effect on the economy.
00:44:35.000Meanwhile, Democrats are hurtling toward a debt ceiling fight.
00:44:39.000It turns out there are some rank-and-file Democrats who are not going to vote for increasing the debt ceiling unless they get a bigger spending bill.
00:44:48.000According to Politico, Democrats' threadbare majorities in Congress are leaving the party with little time to wriggle out of a dangerous economic morass that could overwhelm other priorities, from voting rights to tax increases on the wealthy to a sweeping expansion of the social safety net.
00:45:00.000Top Democrats say they have a plan, but they don't want to talk about it yet.
00:45:03.000Government funding runs out in 18 days, according to Politico.
00:45:06.000The Biden administration says the debt ceiling must be raised shortly after that.
00:45:10.000Senate Republicans say that they are not voting for it.
00:45:13.000The House also doesn't come back until September 20th.
00:45:15.000So this means that you're going to see the progressives now try to hold up the quote-unquote bipartisan infrastructure plan in order to get the $3.5 trillion plan.
00:45:22.000This has turned into a fight between the progressive wing and Joe Manchin.
00:45:25.000Joe Manchin yesterday said, to his credit, he's not going to support this $3.5 trillion boondoggle.
00:45:30.000The realistic number is more like $1.5 trillion.
00:45:34.000He's moving, quote, full speed ahead with this package.
00:45:55.000It's not going to be at 3.5, I can assure you.
00:45:59.000Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders going directly after Joe Manchin and trying to take him out.
00:46:03.000Here's Bernie Sanders saying, well, if you won't pass our $3.5 trillion plan, then we're not going to pass your $1.1 trillion infrastructure bill that's bipartisan.
00:46:11.000Your colleague, Joe Manchin, just explicitly told me, repeatedly, he will not support your $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.
00:46:19.000He wants to see something more in the ballpark of $1.5 trillion.
00:46:26.000No, it's absolutely not acceptable to me.
00:46:28.000I don't think it's acceptable to the president, to the American people, or to the overwhelming majority of the people in the Democratic caucus.
00:46:35.000Okay, so that infighting will be fascinating to watch.
00:46:40.000But again, it is indicative of the fact that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which now has control over the Democratic Party, is moving radically to the left.