Americans are burned out, disconnected, isolated, and starved for time. Maybe it s post-pandemic blues, maybe it s our smartphone addiction, or maybe it's our loneliness epidemic. Whatever the cause, it s serious enough that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has issued a formal advisory to the nation, calling for action to address this epidemic. The real problem is that our social institutions have been summarily destroyed over the course of decades, largely by government. In order for you to earn benefits of being a member of a community, you have to be in the community. In our community, that means when someone falls on hard times, that we all try to bridge the financial gap for people, and that we'll make sure that somebody is able to drive our neighbor's kids home if their parents are stuck at work. But once government stepped in, people no longer had to have skin in the game. Now they had entitlements by dint of breathing. You're here, therefore somebody owes you money. And instead of getting charity from the government, which might come with the requirement that you actually be part of the community and good to your neighbor, instead of going to the office. Government would no longer provide the benefits they were in the 1930s. Instead, they were no longer required to borrow money through the gap of social support. And then government tried to replace the church and destroyed community in the process. And then, in the late 19th century, the first step was the substitution of government benefits for the earned membership of a church. and then government was the replacement of the social structure itself by the social order itself. by replacing the role of the church with the role it played by government by the government. The social order by the New Deal policies that replaced the church in order to be given the role that was given to the poor and the poor, and the need for social support by government . a government that was no longer responsible for your children s care and the work they received from the community they got bigger and bigger, and they got a bigger call on the government to do the work of their neighbors instead of the job they did the work that they were supposed to do for you . and so on and so they got the bigger they got more and bigger. the government got to pay the bigger, better, and so much more, and now they get the bigger benefits from the bigger government.
00:00:15.000Whatever the cause, it's serious enough that Murthy has issued a formal advisory to the nation calling for action to address this epidemic.
00:00:24.000Well, he's hosting events around the country trying to put people in proximity to one another and speaking about the power of friendship.
00:00:30.000At these events, according to Politico, quote, people dressed as dancing unicorns handed out prescriptions for five minutes of social connection.
00:00:42.000That's a thing that you are paying for.
00:00:44.000Murphy then encouraged people to spend 45 seconds writing a text to a loved one.
00:00:48.000Murphy asks people to engage in what he calls the connection exercise.
00:00:51.000He says that such exercises can be supplemented by investments in social infrastructure, which is where policymakers come in.
00:00:59.000Or, alternatively, it's precisely where policy makers and government should butt out.
00:01:04.000See, there is a reason for our loneliness epidemic.
00:01:06.000And that's a real thing, the loneliness epidemic.
00:01:08.000People are lonely, they are disconnected, they are atomized.
00:01:11.000And sure, all of that has to do with smartphones and the internet and the increasing atomization of our lives as we hunker down with our screens and wreck our necks.
00:01:19.000But screens are just a tool to be used for good or ill.
00:01:22.000The real problem is that our social institutions have been summarily destroyed over the course of decades, largely by government.
00:01:28.000Those social institutions used to begin with and center around church.
00:01:32.000Historically, churches performed three interwoven functions.
00:01:36.000First, they provided common orientation around a higher goal, complete with rules and regulations that required skin in the game in order to be accepted into the group.
00:01:44.000So everybody goes to my synagogue, believes in God, and also believes in a series of commandments that we have been given.
00:01:49.000The skin in the game ranges from, for example, wearing a yarmulke, showing that you are committed to the group, and to the idea to keeping kosher.
00:01:56.000And obviously, every church has something similar, a higher orientation, and a set of rules that require skin in the game.
00:02:03.000Second, churches provided economic benefits and social reinforcement, ranging from charity to the helping hands of neighbors.
00:02:09.000In our community, that means when someone falls on hard times, that we all try to find that person a job, that we will bridge the financial gap for people, that we'll make sure that somebody is able to drive our neighbor's kids home if their parents are stuck at work.
00:02:21.000Finally, churches, emerging from the first two functions, create a feeling of community.
00:02:26.000That feeling of community, as sociologist Emil Durkheim wrote in the late 19th century, could only be attained with reference to the sacred, a series of beliefs so worthwhile they were not to be questioned.
00:02:36.000That's what the sacred is, something that is higher, something that is not really open to dissent or question.
00:02:42.000As Robert Nisbet, the sociologist, writes, quote, it is community that gives to the sacred its most vital expressions everywhere, birth, marriage, death, and other moments in the human drama.
00:03:19.000But once government stepped in, people no longer had to have skin in the game of a community in order to be given charity.
00:03:25.000Now they had entitlements by dint of breathing.
00:03:28.000You're here, therefore somebody owes you money.
00:03:30.000According to one study, New Deal policies from the 1930s crowded out 30% of all charitable spending by churches.
00:03:37.000Because instead of people going to church and getting charity from their neighbor, which might come with the awkward requirement that you actually be part of the community and good to your neighbor, instead you just go to the relief office.
00:03:46.000Government benefits are now exponentially greater than they were in the 1930s.
00:03:50.000Family structure itself was dramatically undermined by government spending.
00:03:54.000You were no longer responsible for your kids.
00:03:57.000In fact, if you were a dad, you could just ditch your kids and the single mom would get bigger benefits from the government.
00:04:01.000You were no longer responsible for paying for your elderly parents.
00:04:05.000Government would do that through social security and they would borrow the money to make up the gap.
00:04:09.000Your call on your neighbor no longer required you to sacrifice for the community.
00:04:14.000Instead of you having to go to your neighbor and say, listen, we're members of the same community.
00:04:20.000Instead, you just go to the government.
00:04:22.000The government points its gun at your neighbor and steals his wallet.
00:04:26.000Able to reap the rewards without the cost, many people stopped going to church.
00:04:29.000After all, if you can get the money without having to engage in any of the actual cost structure, why do it?
00:04:34.000And over the course of decades, churches began to adjust to the pews that were emptying out, not by reinforcing the common orientation around a higher goal, sanctity, the thing that really brings people to church, but instead by trying to get rid of judgment so as to include more people.
00:04:48.000Because if the pews are emptying out, there are really only two ways to refill the pews.
00:04:52.000One is a rededication to core principle, and the other is demolishing core principle and basically turning a church into a pizza party.
00:04:59.000Churches began to try to mirror government.
00:05:01.000No skin in the game, plenty of benefits.
00:05:04.000As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote two decades ago, quote, this process of religious accommodation has since gone out of pace, so that today many mainline churches offer little or no resistance to the prevailing culture.
00:05:13.000On the contrary, some are very much part of it, priding themselves on being cosmopolitan and sophisticated, undogmatic and uncensorious.
00:05:21.000This is how you end up with pride flags hanging off 200-year-old churches.
00:05:25.000And thus the sacred has been wiped away, leaving us all alone with our subjective sense of self, catered to by a broad welfare state.
00:05:38.000It can only be cured by a return to community.
00:05:40.000And historically, that community means religious community.
00:05:43.000And that's why it's so sad to see religious leaders playing around the edges of conciliation with value systems that undermine the sacred at every single turn.
00:06:00.000Whether you're making calls on a beach in the Bahamas, on the steps of Buckingham Palace, or at your villa in Santorini, you can dial away.
00:06:41.000And again, you're getting a great deal right now.
00:06:43.000Go to puretalk.com slash Shapiro and start saving on your wireless Today, you'll save an additional 50% off your first month when you go to puretalk.com slash Shapiro.
00:06:56.000Okay, speaking of religion opening its doors to value systems that really undermine the religion, on Monday, According to the vast majority of the legacy media, Pope Francis apparently decided that it was fine for priests to bless same-sex couples.
00:07:09.000That at least was the headline from the legacy media.
00:07:11.000According to the New York Times, this move was quote, his most definitive step yet to make the Roman Catholic Church more welcoming to LGBTQ Catholics and more reflective of his vision of a more pastoral and less rigid church.
00:07:23.000If all of that were true, of course, that would mark a massive shift for the Catholic Church, which has held fast to the traditional teaching that marriage is between one man and one woman, and that sexual union within marriage is the only morally permissible form of sexual union.
00:07:35.000By the way, that is an opinion agreed to by virtually every mainline religion for the past several thousand years.
00:07:40.000The church has held fast for thousands of years, not only to the sanctity of marriage, but to the natural law philosophy inherent in that sanctity, a philosophy that says that the world of God's creation carries within it certain obvious rights and wrongs, teleological ends.
00:07:55.000In this viewpoint, things in nature were designed to perform certain functions.
00:07:58.000The sexual function was designed to create children.
00:08:01.000Man and women were designed to become one flesh, according to this philosophy, and that creation is designed to end in the creation of new human life.
00:08:08.000As philosopher Robert George, who's a Catholic, says, quote, what is unique about marriage is that it is truly a
00:08:13.000comprehensive sharing of life, a sharing founded on the bodily union made uniquely
00:08:17.000possible by the sexual complementarity of man and woman, a complementarity that makes it possible
00:08:21.000for two human beings to become, in the language of the Bible, one flesh, and for this one
00:08:25.000flesh union to be the foundation of a relationship in which it is intelligible for two
00:08:30.000persons to bind themselves to each other in pledges of permanent monogamy and fidelity. So it would
00:08:36.000certainly be a massive surrender for the Catholic Church to reject that teaching on behalf
00:08:40.000of a broader teaching that morality now encompasses sexual relationships of all sorts,
00:08:45.000particularly sexual relationships without any potential whatsoever for the creation of human life, as per
00:08:50.000the LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign agenda.
00:08:53.000So, is the media really accurately reporting what the Pope said?
00:08:58.000Well, his defenders say that he really changed nothing.
00:09:01.000According to the Catholic publication, The Pillar, quote, Fiducia supplicans, which is the name of this publication, says clearly the Vatican does not intend to permit same-sex marriage or anything that resembles it, and says that the church does not actually have the power or authority to do that.
00:09:14.000While the text does create a framework for blessing gay couples, it says that those blessings should not be confused with marriage or even with approval of same-sex unions or homosexual activity.
00:09:23.000Fiducia Supplicans says that blessings are a pastoral resource to be valued, rather than a risk or a problem, and that they may be bestowed upon those persons who, although in a union that cannot be compared in any way to a marriage, desire to entrust themselves to the Lord and His mercy, to invoke His help, and to be guided to a greater understanding of His plan of love and truth.
00:09:41.000Such blessings ought not to be given in any circumstance resembling a sanctification of same-sex unions, says the Vatican, and there is no intention to legitimize anything.
00:09:49.000Furthermore, says the document, the blessing ought to descend on those who quote, do not claim a legitimation of their own status, but who beg that all that is true, good and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit.
00:10:03.000So, is there any reason for the controversy if nothing changed?
00:10:06.000The document itself suggests that blessings should not be, quote, subjected to too many moral prerequisites, and that priests ought not to lose pastoral charity, which should permeate all our decisions and attitudes, and to avoid being, quote, judges who only deny, reject, and exclude.
00:10:20.000Furthermore, the document does not make clear whether the church will, in fact, crack down on liturgical blessings.
00:10:27.000The Pope, in other words, is being vague.
00:10:29.000And others are supposed to clean up after him, which tends to be the way, unfortunately, Pope Francis works a lot.
00:10:35.000My friend Larry O'Connor, Catholic, has a good rundown of his interpretation of the latest missive.
00:10:39.000Here's what he writes, quote, I'm not in full communion with the church.
00:10:42.000As such, I'm required to abstain from partaking in the Eucharist at Mass.
00:10:45.000I walk up to the altar with my arms crossed on my chest and the presiding priest offers me a blessing.
00:10:50.000He is not blessing the situation I am in that keeps me from being in communion with the church.
00:10:54.000He is offering me a priestly blessing so I can continue my faith journey and move forward closer to Christ despite my situation.
00:10:59.000This is exactly what the Vatican has confirmed the pastors may do for individuals who have same-sex attraction and are also not in full communion with the church because of their situation.
00:11:34.000And if sin were what barred you from receiving a blessing, no one could receive a blessing.
00:11:38.000But when a same-sex couple approaches a priest for a blessing as a same-sex couple, the distinction starts to fall away.
00:11:45.000Because again, they are not approaching individually and asking for a blessing individually while being a sinner.
00:11:50.000The idea is that the church knows they are a same-sex couple and they are approaching for a blessing as a same-sex couple and then they're receiving a blessing as a same-sex couple.
00:11:59.000The Pope here is not allowing blessing for individuals who participate in same-sex unions.
00:12:04.000Every traditional religion allows sinners to receive blessings individually, so far as I'm aware.
00:12:09.000Instead, the Vatican is apparently now greenlighting blessings same-sex couples as couples, then pretending it doesn't mean anything, so long as the blessing isn't an outright sanctification of the same-sex relationship.
00:12:20.000Now, that's clearly how the left is reading it.
00:12:22.000The Reverend James Martin, a radical left-wing Catholic, says, quote,
00:12:26.000This new declaration opens the door to non-liturgical blessings for same-sex couples,
00:12:30.000something that had previously been off-limits for bishops, priests, and deacons.
00:12:33.000Along with many priests, I will now be delighted to bless my friends in same-sex unions.
00:12:39.000Now, I'm not a Catholic, but here is the thing.
00:12:42.000We ought to care because when historical pillars of Western tradition, including natural law, begin to carve away at those pillars in the name of tolerance and diversity, when they throw open to doors of the church by getting rid of core principles or by crumbling those core principles, the entire edifice starts to wear away.
00:12:59.000And this is a problem for religious believers of all traditional stripes.
00:13:02.000This is not restricted to the Catholic Church.
00:13:03.000This should not be read as just a critique Of the Pope.
00:13:09.000On the same day the Pope issued his statement, celebrated by the New York Times, the New York Times issued another piece about the collapse of the United Methodist Church, riven by controversy over LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign issues.
00:13:20.000As the Time describes, quote, At issue for Methodists is the question of ordaining and marrying LGBTQ people, a topic that has splintered many other Protestant denominations and which Methodists have been debating for years.
00:13:30.000There were 8 million Methodists in the United States in 2020, according to the U.S.
00:13:35.000Between large-scale departures and the broader trend of decline, according to one source, that number could drop by half in a decade.
00:13:41.000The exodus marks a calamitous decline for the broader tradition of mainline Protestantism, which once dominated the American religious, social, and cultural landscape.
00:13:49.000And herein lies the biggest problem of all.
00:13:52.000There is no substitute for traditional religion in the American landscape, or indeed in the Western landscape more broadly.
00:14:00.000And traditional religion requires skin in the game.
00:14:06.000It requires people to actually believe in a moral system above their own subjective morality.
00:14:10.000The minute religion becomes merely a non-judgmental blessing dumped on top of subjective self-glorification, religion is no longer valuable.
00:14:18.000And when religion loses its value, church crumbles.
00:14:21.000And when church crumbles, social society crumbles.
00:14:24.000And then we are relegated to the Surgeon General of the United States, Vivek Murthy, lecturing us as dancing unicorns hand out prescriptions for social connection.
00:14:35.000When church dies, so does the United States.
00:14:37.000It's why everyone feels so chaotic these days.
00:14:42.000You want to know, by the way, why there's a rising conspiracy theories on every side of the aisle these days?
00:14:45.000It's because when you don't trust in God, you start believing there has to be some other conspiracy responsible for why the world works the way that the world works.
00:14:53.000When you believe in God, it makes it very easy to say, okay, I don't understand what the hell's going on here, but there is someone who does.
00:14:58.000But when you don't believe in God, or when you fear that God may not be in charge, then you start believing that a small cadre of human beings are capable of manipulating events to the nth degree.
00:15:10.000And then you find those human beings, then you blame those human beings.
00:15:13.000And this allows you to believe in any form of conspiracy theory.
00:15:18.000Because once you start believing in those sorts of theories, you can't have a functional democracy or a functional republic along those lines.
00:15:24.000It doesn't mean there aren't conspiracies that are true.
00:15:26.000But when people start believing evidence-free conspiracies, when everything that happens is a sign of a broader conspiracy of which you have no evidence, that's really a problem because it means you can't trust any outcome.
00:15:36.000Every outcome is now inherently untrustworthy.
00:15:39.000And that is a real danger for the country.
00:15:43.000Joe Biden has hit record approval ratings in the 2024 election.
00:15:48.000According to a brand new poll from Monmouth University, he is now down to 34%.
00:15:53.00061% of those polled disapprove of the job that Biden is doing as president with the 2024 presidential election now less than a year away, according to Mediaite.
00:16:00.000And these are really horrifyingly bad numbers for Joe Biden.
00:16:04.000He has a 24% approval rating among independents.
00:16:08.000This puts him behind the eight ball in pretty much every swing state.
00:16:50.000You have to say, what's the main problem?
00:16:52.000How do you deal with the first problem, which is inflation and the cost of living?
00:16:58.000Well, he's right about all that, and you can see it reflected in the polls.
00:17:01.000Meanwhile, the news media are trying to make the case to Joe Biden that the reason that he's losing popularity is because he's not left-wing enough, which is an amazing case to make on behalf of a president who spent more money than any president in American history.
00:17:13.000Here is NBC interviewing young voters who are turning away from Biden.
00:17:16.000And naturally, if you interview all the crazy young people, I mean, and look at these people.
00:17:20.000I mean, my goodness, if this is the next generation, we are so screwed.
00:17:24.000And here they are trying to explain, these are from Dayton County, Wisconsin, why they are unenthused about voting for Joe Biden.
00:17:30.000Give me the emotion that you have looking at your choice this election.
00:17:36.000I'd say overall, I feel very pragmatic and strategic about it.
00:17:40.000All of these issues that, that are popular with Democrats.
00:17:44.000He has not only not addressed, but often gone the entire opposite way.
00:17:49.000I mean, I can look at like almost every issue in my head that's important to me, and I see a failure on Biden's part.
00:17:58.000Okay, well, it's not going to be because of these voters that Joe Biden loses.
00:18:01.000The reason Joe Biden is going to lose if he loses is because he's going to lose those independent voters in the middle.
00:18:05.000Again, he was perceived as the moderate alternative to Trump in 2020.
00:18:09.000He is no longer perceived as a moderate alternative to Trump.
00:18:13.000And that's going to be particularly true if the economy continues to basically stagger along.
00:18:17.000Now, the entire media are invested in the idea that we have now avoided a recession, that the economy is booming, everything is going amazingly well.
00:18:24.000The Washington Post has an entire piece at the top of their website today titled, Everyone Expected a Recession.
00:18:28.000The Fed and White House found a way out.
00:18:42.000If you recall, last year we actually did have a couple of consecutive quarters of negative growth, which technically qualifies as a recession.
00:18:49.000But, if the idea here is that we're avoiding a gigantic recession in favor of Obama-esque stagnation for a long period of time, that's probably true, and that stagnation is going to get worse.
00:18:59.000Because there are a few economic factors that cut in favor of the idea that the stock market, for example, is actually ahead of where the Federal Reserve is.
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00:21:28.000Now, he added on top of that, with record spending into an economy that had too few goods flowing through it.
00:21:34.000And as those supply chains have opened back up, the number of goods has risen, and it is moving toward meeting the amount of money that is flowing through the system.
00:21:42.000However, they, because of their cowardly foreign policy, they are now experiencing the possibility of serious problems on the supply chain again.
00:21:55.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S.
00:21:56.000unveiled a multinational naval force to protect merchant vessels in the Red Sea after Houthi rebel attacks threatened the Suez Canal's central role in global trade.
00:22:03.000On Monday, the Pentagon said it was establishing a security operation to protect seaborne traffic from ballistic missiles and drone attacks launched by the Houthi groups in Yemen.
00:22:11.000That effort, called Operation Prosperity Guardian, will include the UK, Bahrain, France, Norway, and other countries.
00:22:17.000Many of the world's biggest shipping lines, oil producers, and other cargo owners in recent days started diverting vessels from the entire region, prompting a massive spike in oil prices and general insurance rates.
00:22:26.000In fact, European natural gas prices had surged by as much as 13% in the middle of the disruption of the energy flow caused by these ragtag group of hoothie pirates.
00:22:36.000officials tried to secure the support of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
00:22:40.000The two countries have opted to stay out for now because they're not sure what exactly to do with the Houthis and they're deeply afraid that Iran is going to attack UAE or Saudi Arabia in retaliation for them getting involved in stopping the Houthis.
00:22:50.000The oil giant BP on Monday was the latest company to halt its tankers from sailing through the Red Sea.
00:22:55.000Now, for all the people who tend to believe that foreign policy has no impact on how you live your life, that obviously is untrue.
00:23:00.000Things get way more expensive when the seas are not free for trade.
00:23:17.000If those two things do not happen, you can forget about your cheap goods at the store.
00:23:21.000You can forget about being able to afford all the nice things you can afford.
00:23:24.000I know there is this weird take out there that somehow foreign policy doesn't affect you in any way or that your life would be significantly better if you did not have cheaper goods available to you.
00:23:36.000This strange idea that our lives on a material level, forget about a spiritual level, on a material level are somehow not better than they were in 1980 is so ridiculous on every possible level.
00:23:47.000You have a bigger house than you did in 1980.
00:23:49.000You have more devices than you did in 1980.
00:24:20.000These are hot points that can absolutely crush you at the supermarket if they're not guaranteed by a Western Navy.
00:24:28.000And the reality that the United States is only now starting to say, okay, maybe we'll escort some ships through the Bab-El-Mandeb Strait or whatever it is.
00:24:34.000Again, that is going to have some pretty significant knock-on effects.
00:24:38.000If the Red Sea becomes a no-go zone for most tankers, according to the Wall Street Journal, it would redraw the global oil market for the second time in two years.
00:24:44.000After the war on Ukraine and related sanctions forced Russia to find new markets for its petroleum.
00:24:49.000That could send oil prices and tanker rates vaulting higher, according to Richard Matthews, research director at EA Gibson Shipbrokers.
00:24:55.000He says, all you know is it's going to cause chaos.
00:24:56.000Everything is going to get a lot more expensive.
00:24:58.000As of Monday morning, Matthews said most tanker companies were still willing to send their vessels through the shipping choke point, preventing a jump in prices.
00:25:04.000But if the Houthis continue their attacks in these particular areas, then things are going to get worse.
00:25:10.000Now, there are two ways to prevent those attacks in these areas.
00:25:16.000The only way to prevent the attacks in the area is by blowing the pirates out of the water.
00:25:18.000That's really the only way to do that.
00:25:20.000Because you can pretend that if you just run away from the area that magically terrorist groups are not going to then attempt to do the same thing and grab money and ransom these ships, for example.
00:25:30.000So I'm glad that the Biden administration, as always late, is attempting to do something about this, but Again, cowardly foreign policy ends with much, much worse economic circumstances for American taxpayers.
00:25:41.000And you add on to that the fact that we are about to enter into the era of big taxes, and the weak foreign policy, high tax economy of the United States, which is very reminiscent of the 1970s, it's not going to be great.
00:25:55.000The 1970s were a time where we had overspent and we decided to recede on foreign policy.
00:25:58.000And the combination of those two factors led to much higher prices at home.
00:26:08.000According to the Wall Street Journal, rich countries are raising more money from taxpayers than they have in decades to finance a burst of state spending as surging interest rates make borrowing less attractive.
00:26:16.000Tax revenues have risen to record levels as a share of economic output in a number of major economies, including France, Japan, and South Korea.
00:26:22.000The increases are worth hundreds of billions of dollars in additional revenue for governments that are navigating an array of new spending needs, from military priorities to industrial policy.
00:26:31.000So governments continue to spend, and in order to keep up with that spending, they're going to have to increase the tax revenue.
00:26:35.000In order to do that, they're going to have to jack up the taxes.
00:26:38.000It's something that Joe Biden has wanted to do for quite a while.
00:26:40.000Now, the United States has been able to rely on the fact that we are still the best bet on the block when it comes to our debt because we're still the strongest economy.
00:26:46.000There will come a point when that is no longer true.
00:26:49.000In fact, we are fast approaching that point when no one's going to want to actually buy U.S.
00:26:52.000debt because of the possibility that down the road we're not going to actually repay that debt or we're going to inflate our way out of it.
00:27:01.000In the 20-nation Eurozone, according to the Wall Street Journal, government spending will reach half of the region's economic output this year, according to the IMF.
00:27:09.000In the United States, state spending stands at 38% of GDP.
00:27:13.000In the entire GDP of the country, the country is now spending 38% of that on social services and such.
00:27:20.000New costs are coming down the track too, because the country and the West are getting older, We have baked into the cake extraordinary mandatory spending programs, and the only way to pay for that is to increase the taxes.
00:27:33.000You can try to grow your way out of it, but you're not going to grow your way out of it given the policies, the regulatory and business policies pursued by this administration.
00:27:40.000If you don't grow your way out of it, then you're not gonna be able to pay for any of this stuff without radically raising taxes or radically inflating the currency or both.
00:27:47.000And the Federal Reserve knows this, by the way.
00:27:50.000So right now, the stock market is a little bit disconnected from the Federal Reserve.
00:27:53.000So, the Federal Reserve announced the other day that they were not going to be raising the interest rates.
00:27:57.000And this was taken as a sign that inflation has been defeated in the United States, and the Federal Reserve knows it.
00:28:01.000And so pretty soon, they're going to start lowering those interest rates, which will make it easier to get a mortgage, it'll make your credit card rates go down, and all the rest.
00:28:07.000And people are getting very enthusiastic.
00:28:08.000Okay, well, I'm going to take that money, I'm going to put it right back in the stock market.
00:28:12.000But the problem is, people are doing that now, in anticipation of the Fed lowering the interest rates.
00:28:17.000They're actually a little bit ahead of the market at this point, as Mohamed El-Erian is saying.
00:28:22.000Mohamed El-Erian is an excellent financial analyst.
00:28:24.000He is saying that if right now people are expecting the Fed to lower the interest rates and they don't lower the interest rates in the next year as much as expected, the stock market will drop.
00:28:34.000So again, Joe Biden's economy is on tensorhooks because of many systemic problems created over the course of decades and then exacerbated by Joe Biden.
00:28:42.000Now again, as we mentioned a moment ago, some of that exacerbation is being driven by events in the Middle East.
00:28:48.000Now the best way to guarantee the freedom of the seas in the Middle East is to, you know, not let pirates push you around.
00:28:52.000Is to not let the Iranians push you around in the region.
00:28:55.000And one of the best ways to not let the Iranians push you around in the region is that when one of the Iranian proxy groups commits the worst terror attack since 9-11, you let an ally of the United States completely destroy that terror group.
00:29:07.000That'd be an excellent way to throw Iran off of this, to push them back, to contain them, so to speak, without going directly to war with them, cutting off the arms of the octopus if you're not willing to go directly at the head.
00:29:19.000Israel, for its part, wants to do exactly that.
00:29:21.000Right now, Israel is attempting to push another Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, off their northern border.
00:29:27.000They want to prevent another conflict like the one that is currently happening.
00:29:30.000According to Axios, Israel told the Biden administration it wants Hezbollah's forces to be pushed roughly six miles from the border as part of a diplomatic deal to end tensions with Lebanon.
00:29:38.000The Biden administration is deeply concerned that escalating border skirmishes could lead to an all-out war that would be even worse than the Gaza conflict.
00:29:52.000That's why they've got 131 dead soldiers over the course of the last couple of months in the Gaza Strip.
00:29:57.000That is not going to apply in an arena where Hezbollah is far better armed and has rockets capable of reaching the entirety of Israel.
00:30:05.000The Israeli government says publicly that in order to allow Israeli citizens to go back to their homes, the situation needs to change, either through diplomacy or military action.
00:30:14.000The tensions on the border with Lebanon were one of the main issues under discussion between Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Galant in Tel Aviv.
00:30:24.000They want Hezbollah not to be allowed to go back to their positions along the border, which Israel destroyed in the last couple of months.
00:30:29.000Again, Israel, they have 30,000 citizens who are currently not living in their homes.
00:30:33.000They're not going to allow this to continue the way that it is.
00:30:36.000But one of the preconditions to a solid foreign policy is not wish-casting foreign policy.
00:30:40.000Unfortunately, the United States seems to be in the weird position of being half realist and half wish-casting.
00:30:46.000So on the realist side, Lloyd Austin, yesterday he was in Israel and he said he's not here to dictate timelines to the Israeli government.
00:30:54.000Regarding the timeline, this is Israel's operation, and I'm not here to dictate timelines or terms.
00:31:05.000Our support to Israel's right to defend itself is ironclad, as you've heard me say a number of times, and that's not going to change.
00:31:14.000It's critical, as I said earlier, that Hamas not be able to threaten Israel from Gaza Or even threaten Gaza anymore.
00:31:27.000Okay, but then Lloyd Austin starts his wish-casting.
00:31:29.000He says, Hamas does not speak for the Palestinian people.
00:31:33.000It matters because there's this weird idea that is prevalent in American foreign policy circles that the Palestinian Authority, run by Abu Mazen Mahmoud Abbas, who is an actual Holocaust-denying terror supporter, his actual government has law that pays people who kills Jews.
00:31:49.000Right now, there's this weird idea that the Palestinian Authority, which enjoys an extraordinarily low approval rating in the West Bank, where it has governed tyrannically for the last 20 years, Abu Mazen is now in the 17th year of a four-year term.
00:32:01.000They haven't held an election in 17 years.
00:32:04.000And if an election were held today, Hamas would win in the West Bank.
00:32:07.000This idea requires Israel to then make concessions to Iranian proxies that will then maximize their power again.
00:32:15.000Don't wish to cast foreign policy, folks.
00:32:58.000And this weird idea that you can just hand over the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority and this will somehow guarantee Israeli security and Palestinian security is totally insane.
00:33:05.000In just one second, we'll get to the other side of the aisle because Joe Biden obviously has very low approval ratings, but some Republican is going to have to beat him in order to take him out of the White House.
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00:36:16.000Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, Donald Trump running a campaign against Chip Roy.
00:36:23.000We're going to have to bring back good Trump, bad Trump, because that's just the reality of Trump.
00:36:27.000Sometimes he says good things and sometimes he says bad things.
00:36:29.000Well, yesterday, he decided to once again attack Chip Roy, one of the most conservative members of the House Republican Caucus.
00:36:35.000He said, Has any smart and energetic Republican in the great state of Texas decided to run in the primary against Rhino Congressman Chip Roy?
00:36:41.000For the right person, he is very beatable.
00:37:54.000But if the baseline level of trust from the conservative public is very high for Trump, very hard to outflank him that way.
00:38:01.000This seems to be DeSantis' continued message.
00:38:04.000And again, in a primary held today, I vote for DeSantis over Trump and Haley.
00:38:08.000But DeSantis, this line of attack is not going to be fruitful against Donald Trump.
00:38:12.000He says Trump could have pardoned non-violent January 6th protesters, he chose not to.
00:38:16.000Out-peering Donald Trump is not going to work.
00:38:20.000Well, it's interesting on the January 6th protests.
00:38:23.000I mean, he called that rally knowing that that was going to be in D.C.
00:38:28.000where things could get potentially out of hand.
00:38:31.000And he's now saying he would do clemency for, I guess, the nonviolent.
00:38:36.000But he could have done that when he was president.
00:38:39.000He could have said, look, This was, he could have taken responsibility.
00:38:43.000He could have said that the people that went, not the violent people, obviously that's a different, different, it's a bird of a different feather.
00:38:50.000But on the people that were there just as protesters and kind of got caught up in it, he could have granted clemency to them and he chose not to because I think he was told that if he did that, he could potentially risk being convicted at a Senate impeachment trial.
00:39:02.000So the idea that now he's going to help people that were railroaded, he could have done that before he left office.
00:39:10.000Okay, so DeSantis is totally correct about all of this, of course, but that's assuming that the conservative public is deeply interested in Trump's policy positions, which they are not.
00:39:19.000Meanwhile, DeSantis is turning his guns on Nikki Haley, and he's saying that she exemplifies everything that Trump supporters oppose, which, again, is weird because she was the UN ambassador under Trump.
00:39:28.000Very pro-Trump throughout his administration.
00:39:30.000She's flip-flopped on Trump a little bit post his administration.
00:39:34.000Again, if you look at the polls, Trump supporters are likely to shift.
00:39:37.000If DeSantis exits the race, they're not likely to shift to Haley.
00:39:40.000DeSantis' voters would move over to Trump in all likelihood.
00:39:45.000Which is, again, why both of these candidates are very unlikely to defeat Trump in the nomination fight, just speaking technically and looking at the polls right now.
00:39:54.000But here was DeSantis going after Nikki Haley yesterday.
00:39:58.000So she's not going to win a Republican primary.
00:40:00.000So what she's there to do is to take some votes from people who don't want Trump and really, I think, ensure that Trump has a better path to be able to go.
00:40:09.000Interestingly, Donald Trump, so Trump's core supporters do not like Haley because everything they claim they're against, establishment, globalism, liberal Wall Street donors, on and on, that's Haley, right?
00:40:25.000And yet when Trump is asked, Can you categorically rule out her as vice president?
00:40:31.000He will not rule her out as vice president.
00:40:36.000Now again, he is right about all of this, but is that line of attack going to bear fruit?
00:40:40.000Probably not in New Hampshire, where again, Nikki Haley is now in second place by a pretty significant margin.
00:40:46.000It'll be interesting to see what happens in Iowa.
00:40:47.000Meanwhile, Haley's angle on Trump continues to be that he's too old.
00:40:51.000And, you know, maybe that line works a little bit better.
00:40:56.000But the reality is that he's going up against Joe Biden, who's dead.
00:40:59.000So I'm not sure that line works either.
00:41:01.000The most plausible line against Trump from December 2022 was he loses elections a lot.
00:41:08.000And because he loses elections a lot, you don't want to lose the upcoming election.
00:41:10.000But nobody was able to jump in in time to capture that message before Biden started sinking enough in the polls that now Trump is beating him in virtually every poll.
00:41:17.000Here's Nikki Haley going after Donald Trump yesterday.
00:41:22.000Now a clear second place, Nikki Haley, is behind Trump in the first-in-the-nation primary state.
00:41:27.000And on the heels of those new numbers, she's also launching a new ad, not hitting at her Republican rivals, but right at President Biden.
00:43:06.000He has said when it comes to things like giant entitlement programs, not gonna touch them.
00:43:10.000Terrible Paul Ryan, corrupt Paul Ryan, he wanted to touch, I'm not touching the entitlements.
00:43:15.000So that is a quote-unquote moderate position.
00:43:18.000When it comes to LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign issues, he's like, Caitlyn Jenner can use the girls' bathroom, totally fine with it, don't care.
00:43:25.000Every hot button issue, Trump has taken a quasi-moderate position.
00:43:30.000He is not, in fact, a hardcore conservative.
00:43:33.000And also, when people say he's an authoritarian, that's assuming a level of competence that he has not demonstrated in being an authoritarian.
00:43:39.000So, this kind of crap from Douglas Brinkley is not going to work.
00:43:58.000He's just going to remain as dour as ever.
00:44:02.000But we love Mike for all of that because he's an excellent, excellent audio engineer, despite the fact that he is not exactly going to pep in your step with his personality.
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00:45:04.000Well, as I say, the Democratic proposal is that Donald Trump must lose because he's an authoritarian.
00:45:09.000And we don't like authoritarians, except for when Joe Biden is using his pen and his phone to try to mandate that 80 million people take a vaccination or lose their jobs.
00:45:18.000Or like when they try to just by dint of executive order, Get rid of hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt, and then the Supreme Court says no, and then they do it anyway, which is a thing that's literally happening right now.
00:45:30.000They've still been dispersing funds, I'm not kidding, in violation of Supreme Court ruling.
00:46:06.000I'm sorry, like, even people who are suggesting that January 6th was a massive crisis level event for the problem, not just an ugly, horrible thing that happened, which I agree, ugly, horrible, bad images of people storming the Capitol building, hurting police officers and all the rest.
00:46:19.000That was not an existential crisis for the United States, not remotely.
00:46:22.000It was a bunch of dolts and some people who are, like, in good faith there and wandering the halls, who held up the procedure for, like, two hours.
00:47:01.000He's been dabbling in Adolf Hitler his whole life, keeps Hitler's speeches at a bedside.
00:47:07.000Mein Kampf seems to be the book that's inspired.
00:47:10.000Trump the most, so it's heinous because it's the kind of language meant to belittle people, dehumanize them, and when we're not making an anti-Trump comment when we're saying he is a fascist, guys, that really we're dealing with a fight in our country between democracy and fascism, and Trump's telling you that.
00:47:32.000He doesn't really mind the Hitler comparison because at heart he admires Hitler.
00:47:44.000Meanwhile, Eddie Glaude doing the same routine on MSNBC.
00:47:46.000MSNBC, the Trump is Hitler channel, as they say that Trump is tapping into long-standing illiberal tradition.
00:47:51.000Again, hearing people on the left talk about illiberal traditions as they simultaneously shut down free speech on campuses, tell people that they are not allowed to use biological pronouns, use the power of the pen and the phone to do whatever they damn well please.
00:48:07.000I'm having some trouble squaring the circle here.
00:48:11.000Remember, Nazi lawyers in the 1930s are actually looking to American law, anti-miscegenation law, immigration law, as examples.
00:48:19.000Manconf actually quotes the American project as an exemplary project.
00:48:24.000Remember in 1939, in Madison Square Garden, there's an extraordinary Nazi rally.
00:48:29.000So part of what Trump has done, he's tapped into a long-standing illiberal tradition Hmm.