Vladimir Putin surrounds Kiev and puts his nuclear forces on high alert as Europe moves to isolate him, and Joe Biden's approval ratings dump down into the high 30s. Plus, the latest on the latest in Ukraine, and why you need the best mattress on planet Earth made just for you. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by Express VPN. Protect your online privacy today at ExpressVPN.org/ProtectYourOnline Privacy. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers Use the promo code: CRIMINALS at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase when you place an order with ExpressVPN! Protect Your Online Privacy: Protect Your Privacy: Today at ExpressVpn.com/ ProtectYourOnlinePrivacy. Ben Shapiro: The Real State of the Union: I'll Tell You Where We're Really At As a Country, Tonight on The Daily Wire's YouTube Channel. Subscribe to the Daily Wire on YouTube and watch the Real State Of The Union as soon as Joe Biden finishes his State of The Union response tomorrow night, starting at 8:15pm ET. And make sure to check out The Dailywire.co/TheBenShapiroShow on YouTube! And if you like what you're listening to, you'll get 20% off the entire Daily Wire channel starting at $99.99 a month, plus an additional 20% discount when you sign up for VIP access to the show! Subscribe and get an ad discount when the ad is available for the show starts! You'll get 7 days early and receive an ad-free version of the show only through Prime Video + 3 VIP membership plan! If you decide to become a member of Prime Video Plus gets a FREE VIP membership, they'll get 5% off my ad-only deal, and I'll get a discount on my first month, too get 7-day shipping, and 5-choice pricing, and 7-choice shipping throughout the rest of the service, and they'll also get access to my entire ad-plan, and a discount, plus I'll receive $50/month gets a discount starts starts starts at $75/place gets $99/month, plus they get $19/choice gets a special offer, and he'll get VIP access gets $5/choice of the VIP discount starts after I'm also gets $24/throttled through the VIP gets VIP access starts starts, plus a discount gets $25/choice starts, and there's also a discount offers starts starts after they get my first choice of VIP gets my first place gets my ad gets a VIP gets $29/4/4 and I get a VIP discount?
00:00:00.000Vladimir Putin surrounds Kiev and puts his nuclear forces on high alert as Europe moves to isolate him and Joe Biden's approval ratings dump down into the high 30s.
00:00:15.000The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
00:00:18.000Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
00:00:21.000You may have noticed over the weekend that Vladimir Putin put his nuclear forces on high alert, so maybe that's been affecting your sleep just a little bit.
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00:01:49.000But I'm going to because everything has gotten worse in one short year.
00:01:52.000Every single thing that Joe Biden touches, as President Trump says, has turned to crap.
00:01:56.000And that's why this year I am going to be giving a response.
00:01:59.000to the State of the Union address exactly 15 minutes following President Biden's remarks before that joint session of Congress and call it the real State of the Union.
00:02:07.000I'm going to tell you where we're really at as a country.
00:02:09.000I assure you that my State of the Union response will be free of focus group testing.
00:02:12.000I'll be holding the President accountable.
00:02:14.000There'll be no hiding behind COVID or blaming rogue dictators.
00:02:17.000We'll be holding Joe Biden accountable.
00:02:19.000I will destroy his State of the Union with facts and logic precisely 15 minutes after his State of the Union address ends.
00:02:25.000Join me, Jeremy Boring, Michael Mills, Matt Walsh and Andrew Clavin tomorrow night at 8.15pm Eastern, 7.15pm Central on The Daily Wire's YouTube channel.
00:02:32.000We'll be covering the State of the Union and then my real State of the Union response will be airing live as soon as Joe Biden's address ends on that same channel.
00:02:41.000Okay, so the latest in Ukraine is that the Russian advance on Kiev has continued.
00:02:48.000They have not taken the city yet, which is an amazing accomplishment for the Ukrainian military, which is wildly outgunned by the Russian military.
00:02:55.000The Ukrainian military budget versus the Russian military budget.
00:02:58.000It's just the size differential is astonishing.
00:03:03.000The simple fact is that Ukraine has the power to fight a guerrilla war, but I don't think anybody thought they were going to go toe-to-toe with the Russians at this point.
00:03:10.000Ukraine has about $6 billion in their defense budget, but that is one-tenth of Russia's defense budget, according to the latest data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
00:03:19.000Yet somehow, Ukraine is still holding off the Russians from taking its major cities, which is a major, major accomplishment at this point.
00:03:25.000Now, Russia is activating apparently One third more of its force, which has been located mostly in Belarus.
00:03:30.000Belarus is talking about sending in its own troops because Belarus is basically a proxy state for Moscow at this point.
00:03:36.000But the simple fact that the Ukrainian government has lasted this long must put a scare into Vladimir Putin in a very, very serious way and lead to a lot of pride among Ukrainian citizens who've basically been going this alone.
00:03:49.000There have been heavy economic sanctions that have been placed on the Russian government, as we'll get to in just a minute.
00:03:53.000Only in the last 24 to 48 hours has there been real materiel shipped into Ukraine from the European Union.
00:04:00.000But it's looking as though if Vladimir Putin can't clean this thing up inside of the next week, this turns into a prolonged guerrilla war at the very, very least for him.
00:04:09.000Vladimir Zelensky doing an incredible job leading the Ukrainian people.
00:04:22.000That's the kind of stuff that nation building myths are made from.
00:04:26.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Russian and Ukrainian officials were meeting For the first talks since Moscow began its invasion four days ago as Ukraine's defenders held on to the capital in Kiev and pushed back Russian troops in urban combat in their second largest city, Kharkiv.
00:04:39.000In a sign of growing tensions with the West over Ukraine, Vladimir Putin also ordered the country's nuclear deterrence forces to be put on alert.
00:04:46.000He doesn't mean to nuke anybody at this point.
00:04:48.000What he is doing is sort of signaling that if things go badly or if there is too many, if there's too much intervention by the outside world, then maybe, just maybe he'll start firing up The nuclear missiles.
00:04:58.000Now that is highly unlikely because that of course would be suicidal for him but it has a lot of people on edge.
00:05:03.000You never want to be in a situation where you are one button push away from nuclear war obviously.
00:05:07.000According to the Wall Street Journal, a delegation led by Ukraine's defense minister began those ceasefire talks on Monday with Russian officials at the Ukrainian border with Belarus, as Ukrainian forces repelled a series of Russian attacks on the capital and Russian troops shelled a residential neighborhood in the eastern city of Kharkiv, as the talks on the fifth day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine come after Russia's forces have struggled to make headway in most of the country and failed so far to take any of Ukraine's major cities as they faced fierce resistance.
00:05:32.000Russia was pouring large reinforcement convoys across the border on Monday in what could be preparation for a new push on Kiev and an attempt to besiege it.
00:05:38.000They withdrew a bunch of their tanks and military munitions from around Kiev late last night.
00:05:46.000And the impression by military experts is that this was preparing the way for a heavy bombing campaign.
00:05:51.000Now, at the very beginning of this war, there was a baseline assumption that the Russians would take out the Ukrainian Air Force.
00:05:55.000They still have not taken out the Ukrainian Air Force.
00:05:57.000Not only that, the EU is now shipping New jets into Ukraine as we speak.
00:06:02.000So this war is actually heating up for the Russians.
00:06:04.000It is not being tamped down nearly as fast as they thought it would be.
00:06:07.000An indication that Moscow may be shifting to a more destructive approach of targeting civilian areas.
00:06:11.000A northern neighborhood of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, came under shelling by multiple rocket launchers on Monday.
00:06:19.000According to witnesses and video footage from the area, this is the Wall Street Journal reporting, the extent of civilian casualties was not immediately known.
00:06:27.000The chances of a ceasefire being agreed to on Monday are extremely unlikely, given the fact that Putin has already gone in this far.
00:06:34.000As additional Russian forces enter Ukraine, Kiev continued to bolster its own military by mobilizing 100,000 new troops and arming its units with sophisticated new weaponry flowing in from the West.
00:06:43.000Authorities in Kiev, which was under curfew starting on Saturday afternoon, while Ukrainian forces engaged in firefights in several neighborhoods with Russian infiltrator units wearing civilian clothes or Ukrainian uniforms, allowed residents to move around on Monday morning.
00:06:54.000The metro is still working inside of Kiev at this point.
00:06:57.000Meanwhile, the Russian markets are completely shut down.
00:06:59.000They had to shut down their stock market because the ruble dumped about 30% and they have runs on banks in Russia.
00:07:05.000Because of the cutoff from the international banking system that has finally, finally materialized, not with much help from the United States, by the way.
00:07:11.000Outside one supermarket on the western side of Kiev, according to the Journal, the waiting time to enter was roughly two hours, even though many of the neighborhood's residents have fled the city for the relative safety of western Ukraine.
00:07:22.000The city was calm, no looting, no violence.
00:07:23.000Regular troops and volunteers with yellow armbands manned checkpoints at key intersections.
00:07:27.000Key authorities warned that any looters would be shot on sight.
00:07:30.000In some areas, signs of intense fighting were visible, with broken glass, a car with a bullet hole in its windshield, fragments of shells, and grenades.
00:07:37.000If you take a look at the map, what you see is that the Russian ground troops have penetrated Parts of the North, they've done more serious penetration in the South.
00:07:47.000And so the border of Ukraine seems to be shrinking gradually, although not nearly as extensively as people thought it would be this far into the war.
00:07:56.000Zelensky said on Monday, on the fifth day of the full scale Russian invasion against the people of Ukraine, we are standing firm.
00:08:01.000Every crime the occupiers commit against us brings us closer and closer to each other.
00:08:04.000Russia never imagined it would face such solidarity.
00:08:07.000Yuval Noah Harari, who usually writes on sort of anthropology, has a good piece over at The Guardian pointing out that if Putin's goal here was to prove that the Ukrainians were not actually a people of its own and that they actually were Russian, he has done precisely the opposite.
00:08:20.000The Ukrainian people have united like never before.
00:08:22.000They're proving in the face of overwhelming firepower that they are not going to buckle in the face of Vladimir Putin's threats.
00:08:29.000Putin refused to take a call from Zelensky on the eve of Thursday's invasion, which he said seeks to oust the Ukrainian government and, quote unquote, demilitarize the country.
00:08:37.000Russia sent a delegation to the southern Belarusian city of Gomel on Sunday.
00:08:40.000Zelensky initially said he refused to meet in a country that had become a launchpad for Russia's attacks, but he did speak by phone to the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko later on Sunday.
00:08:49.000Lukashenko has said he might mobilize troops in support of Vladimir Putin.
00:08:53.000And apparently he then agreed to have some envoys head on over to the Ukrainian-Belarusian border.
00:08:57.000He wasn't going to go himself, frankly, because he's afraid that he was going to be assassinated.
00:09:01.000There is talk already that the Russians have been sending in kill squads into the middle of Kiev in an attempt to find Zelensky and just kill him outright.
00:09:09.000So that is the state of play on the ground.
00:09:11.000The mayor of Kiev put out a tweet last night suggesting that the entire city had basically been cut off and surrounded.
00:09:25.000According to the Daily Mail, more than 400 Russian mercenaries have been flown in from Africa to assassinate Zelensky.
00:09:31.000A private militia known as the Wagner Group allegedly has orders from Putin to take out Zelensky and 23 other government figures to allow Moscow to take over its eastern neighbor.
00:09:41.000Times, the army for hire run by oligarchy Evgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Putin, was flown in five weeks ago and is now being offered a huge sum for the mission.
00:09:50.000The highly trained operatives are said to be waiting for a green light from the Kremlin to pounce.
00:09:52.000Their hit list also includes Ukraine's prime minister, the entire cabinet, mayor of Kiev Vitaly Klitschko, and his brother Vladimir, both boxing champions who become iconic figures on the front lines of the capital.
00:10:04.000So that is the current state of play over there.
00:10:06.000Meanwhile, the Europeans are actually getting involved much more than the United States is, by the way.
00:10:12.000As we will get to in just a moment, Joe Biden is trying to claim credit for quote-unquote mobilizing the world.
00:10:16.000The reality is that he didn't do much of anything.
00:10:19.000Vladimir Putin mobilized the European Union in the same way that Barack Obama created peace in the Middle East by siding with Iran and then forcing Israel and the Arab countries to come to some sort of agreement that their security meant more than their disagreements about the Palestinian issue.
00:10:33.000In the same way, the EU for years would not do anything to defend itself, and now Vladimir Putin in one fell swoop has caused the EU to suddenly decide that it is in fact an entity worth preserving and defending against Russian predation.
00:10:45.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the European Union for the first time will now finance the purchase and delivery of weapons in a show of support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion, according to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
00:10:55.000The EU will also extend to Belarus sanctions similar to those that imposed on Russia.
00:10:59.000They're banning the entry of Russian planes into EU airspace.
00:11:02.000They're banning from the 27 country block Russian state-owned media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik, as well as their subsidiaries.
00:11:09.000von der Leyen said the EU's decision to finance arms purchases was a watershed moment.
00:11:14.000The EU traces its roots to the post-World War II peace efforts and began as an economic alliance.
00:11:19.000So the EU is now effectively rearming.
00:11:21.000They are saying that we are not going to take this sitting down, nor are we going to hold ourselves subject to the predation of the Russian government.
00:11:29.000The European Union has also, you remember that time that Donald Trump said that NATO should increase, all the NATO countries should increase their amount of spending, percentage of their GDP on defense?
00:11:39.000And everybody got very angry at him for saying all of this?
00:11:42.000Well all it took was Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine for that to happen.
00:11:44.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Germany is now going to boost its own military spending above 2% of GDP.
00:11:49.000And create a strategic natural gas reserve.
00:11:51.000They're actually taking this seriously.
00:11:52.000So after decades of shutting down their own ability to power their economy via carbon-based fuels, they've decided that they're going to re-up on that.
00:12:00.000They're going to stop with all of this, let's spend billions and billions of dollars on green tech and make ourselves more dependent on Russian natural gas and oil.
00:12:07.000Instead, they're going to create their own strategic natural gas reserve and essentially rearm.
00:12:12.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the measures, all of which had long been resisted by successive governments and will now be reflected in this year's budget, underline how profoundly Russia's attack on Ukraine is upending European politics after almost eight decades of nearly uninterrupted peace on the continent.
00:12:24.000Olaf Scholz said, we have to ask ourselves, what capacities does Putin's Russia have?
00:12:28.000Which capacities do we need to counter his threats?
00:12:31.000It's clear we need to invest a lot more in the security of our country to defend our freedom and our democracy.
00:12:35.000Putin wants to establish a Russian empire.
00:12:37.000The question is whether we can summon the strength to set boundaries to warmongers like Putin.
00:12:42.000For decades, Germany had managed to reconcile rising welfare expenditure with budget surpluses by constraining investment in defense and other areas hollowing out its armed forces.
00:12:50.000Also, the country has resisted diversifying its energy resources, relying instead on plentiful Russian gas supplied through the controversial Nord Stream undersea pipeline running between the two countries.
00:13:00.000Germany has more than half of its gas coming from Russia.
00:13:02.000Scholz said he would immediately invest the equivalent of 100 billion euros in weaponry.
00:13:07.000Starting now, he said, Germany's military spending would exceed the NATO organization's spending target of 2% of GDP. He also said the government would create strategic gas reserves and finance the building of two liquefied natural gas import terminals on the country's northern coast.
00:13:21.000So finally, the Europeans are actually getting serious about what it is they are doing at this point.
00:13:27.000Ukraine, for its part, is saying, we would like to join the EU formally.
00:13:31.000So all of the things that Vladimir Putin was seeking to prevent here, namely Ukraine joining the EU formally, he has now essentially forced the hand, which by the way, means that he is going to have to go through full scale with the invasion.
00:13:42.000There's not going to be a peace agreement here short of Zelensky essentially surrendering himself to Putin, which he's not going to do.
00:13:49.000According to CNN, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the European Union on Monday to urgently admit Ukraine to the bloc.
00:13:55.000He said in his latest video message, we appeal to the European Union to urgently admit Ukraine using a new procedure.
00:14:00.000We are grateful to partners for standing with us.
00:14:02.000Our goal is to be with all Europeans and to be equal to them.
00:14:07.000Apparently, he spoke on Sunday with the presidents of Portugal, Lithuania, France and Poland, as well as the prime ministers of Belgium, Spain and the United Kingdom.
00:14:14.000Already coming up, Russia, its economy is really teetering right now.
00:14:18.000The Russian ruble is in serious, serious trouble.
00:14:20.000We'll bring you more on that in just one moment.
00:14:22.000First, right now, best time to refinance your mortgage.
00:14:25.000You need to do it like right now because those rates are going to rise.
00:15:15.000That's 866-721-3300 or visit AmericanFinancing.net to get started.
00:15:23.000Meanwhile, the Russian ruble is just dying on the vine here.
00:15:28.000According to CNN, Russia's currency crashed to a record low against the U.S.
00:15:32.000dollar Monday as the country's financial system reeled from crushing sanctions imposed by Western countries in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
00:15:38.000The ruble lost more than 30 percent of its value, trading at 109 to the dollar after plummeting as much as 40 percent.
00:15:45.000The start of trading on the Russian stock market was actually canceled.
00:15:47.000The latest barrage of sanctions came on Saturday when the United States, EU, UK and Canada said they would expel some Russian banks from SWIFT, a global financial messaging service, and paralyze the assets of Russia's central bank.
00:15:58.000The United States had been Wildly hesitant to do that.
00:16:01.000And apparently now they're going to go forward with this after being forced into it by the Europeans.
00:16:06.000President Vladimir Putin's government has spent the last eight years prepping Russia for tough sanctions.
00:16:10.000They built up a war chest of $630 billion in foreign currency reserves.
00:16:14.000But his fortress economy is now under unprecedented assault.
00:16:16.000At least some of that financial firepower is now frozen.
00:16:20.000According to von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, we will also ban the transactions of Russia's central bank and freeze all of its assets to prevent it from financing Putin's war.
00:16:29.000The collapse in the currency prompted the Russian Central Bank to implement emergency measures on Monday, including a huge hike in interest rates to 20% from 9.5% because basically they're trying to discourage people from taking loans.
00:17:21.000announced new sanctions against Russia, saying they planned to cut some Russian banks off the SWIFT financial network and would take actions to prevent Russia's central bank deploying that $600 billion in reserves to help Russia's economy.
00:17:32.000The joint statements from all of these governments sent a powerful signal of how the West could flex its collective muscle after debating how to respond to Russian aggression.
00:17:39.000And this is a significant step up in efforts by Western capitals to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin to seek a diplomatic off-ramp to the crisis.
00:17:50.000So expect inflation supply chains to be attenuated.
00:17:56.000There will be sacrifice that has to be undergone by Europeans and, yes, Americans economically in order to fend off Russia here and in order to support Ukraine.
00:18:05.000And President Biden should be asking the American people.
00:18:11.000One of the things that's kind of amazing about this is the spectacle of watching as the United States, the White House, they're not sure whether they want to be seen as leading this or whether they want to be seen as leading from behind.
00:18:23.000So on the one hand, Joe Biden wants to take credit for this.
00:18:26.000He wants to say that he's been the one who's making all of this happen.
00:18:29.000On the other hand, he pretty clearly is not the one making all this happen.
00:18:33.000So at the same time that the Germans, who have been, again, investing billions and billions, tons of money, into their green energy infrastructure that's been utterly insufficient, and under the table has been powered by Russian natural gas and oil, They're cutting off Russian natural gas and oil, and they're starting to develop their own oil reserves.
00:18:50.000In the United States, we have not even cut off Russia's energy sector at this point.
00:18:53.000Representative Brad Sherman from California, he said, yeah, we're really not going to cut off their oil and natural gas because we need it.
00:19:16.000Why is it that the Europeans are taking a harsher stance on this when the United States has much more in terms of oil resources than the Europeans do?
00:19:25.000These sanctions are actually rather modest compared to what we did to Iran back in 2014.
00:19:31.000We have not used the SWIFT system to cut them out of international banking.
00:19:36.000And the reason we did it is because both the United States, but particularly Europe, want to keep buying Russian oil and natural gas, and want to keep paying for it, and of course need a banking system to pay for it.
00:19:54.000According to the Wall Street Journal today, the European Union said it had agreed with all these countries to eject some of Russia's banks from the global financial system.
00:20:02.000But, but, they're only cutting off some of those banks.
00:20:06.000The reason they're only cutting off some of the banks is because they don't want to cut off Russia's energy sector.
00:20:10.000That continues through non-sanctioned banks.
00:20:12.000According to the Wall Street Journal, Russia is one of the world's top oil and natural gas producers.
00:20:16.000Energy exports represent half of the country's foreign sales.
00:20:19.000The country Now embroiled in a bitter war in Ukraine provides around 40% of all of Europe's natural gas, about 50% of all of Germany's natural gas.
00:20:26.000The commodity heats the continent, fuels many of its power plants, is a critical input for a range of industrial processes.
00:20:31.000Russia's crude production is a major factor in the global oil marketplace.
00:20:35.000Policymakers are tailoring their pressure campaign to protect their energy supply, prevent a surge in oil prices, and minimize the damage to their own economies.
00:20:42.000Justine Walker, head of sanctions and risk at the Associate of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist said, you can't get away from the fact that Europe still has a dependency on Russia.
00:20:52.000So the continuing dependence on Russian oil means that all the sanctions that are being undertaken, they're damaging the Russian economy, but they are not the mother of all bombs here.
00:21:01.000A senior Biden official said on Saturday officials were carefully selecting which Russian banks to eject from the SWIFT network to minimize disruption of energy markets.
00:21:09.000The official said, we know where most of the energy flows occur, through which banks they occur, and if we take that approach, we can simply choose the institutions where most of the energy flows do not occur.
00:21:18.000And meanwhile, the attempt by the United States to split off China from Russia is utterly unavailing.
00:21:26.000So all of the economic sanctions that we're placing on Russia, they're going to be to little avail if China continues to funnel money to Russia.
00:21:33.000And they have a mutual interest in doing so.
00:21:34.000First of all, China gets a lot of oil from Russia and so they want to remain on warm terms with Russia.
00:21:39.000And second of all, Russia needs China's help in the international marketplace because people have not cut off China at the knees as of yet.
00:21:45.000Meanwhile, China is happy to see Russia invade Ukraine as a predicate to China invading Taiwan.
00:21:50.000There was a story that came out late last week that the Biden administration had spent months attempting to get China to split off from Russia and in fact had shown them confidential intelligence, which China then promptly turned around and handed directly to the Russians.
00:22:03.000According to the New York Times, They visited a hockey rink in Beijing and the panda enclosure at the Moscow Zoo.
00:22:09.000They shared blinis layered with caviar in Russia and reciprocally the popular variant in China, Jianbing.
00:22:14.000They have shared birthday cakes and exchanged toasts with shots of vodka while demurring that neither would dare go overboard with the stuff.
00:22:18.000For more than a decade, Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia have forged a respectful, perhaps even warm relationship, reflecting the deepening ties between two world powers that share common cause against American military and economic might.
00:22:31.000The invasion of Ukraine could upend all that or forge in diplomatic isolation an alliance that reshapes the world order in the 21st century.
00:22:40.000So Xi is sort of in a balancing act right now.
00:22:43.000He doesn't want to completely cut off the West because he makes a lot of money from the West.
00:22:47.000But he didn't do anything to ward off the invasion.
00:22:49.000He didn't try to tell Putin not to do it.
00:24:04.000You can always start small and buy more seats later on if you want your Allform sofa to grow and change with you when you move.
00:24:10.000Allform sofas are also delivered directly to your door.
00:24:12.000In the past, if you wanted to order that sofa, you'd need to hire somebody to come and assemble it in your home or break your back trying to put it together yourself.
00:24:51.000I mean, one of the big things that this means is that for all of the pretensions of people in the West to the idea that we had basically fought in World War II, the war to end all wars, and that all of international politics had now shifted.
00:25:05.000And then the aftermath of the Cold War, there was a dramatic shift in politics and that the wars of the past were over.
00:25:10.000There wouldn't be no more major border wars.
00:25:13.000After all, we're an international community with a huge global marketplace.
00:25:17.000The belief that there wouldn't be resource wars anymore, because after all, we're going to go on green energy, we're going to develop new sources of energy.
00:25:23.000All of those old questions about things like who has access to the oil, all of that would be a thing of the past.
00:25:30.000It turns out the old ways of politics remain, because all politics are are an extension of human nature, and human nature does not change.
00:25:37.000So it turns out you weren't going to get aggressive countries like Putin on their own borders.
00:25:41.000And we could ignore it, we could pretend it wasn't happening in Georgia, wasn't happening in Crimea, wasn't happening in Kazakhstan, wasn't happening in Belarus where the Russians were effectively setting up puppet states.
00:25:50.000We could pretend all that wasn't happening because after all we were in a new modern era.
00:25:54.000But Vladimir Putin wasn't in that era.
00:25:55.000We could pretend that oil wars were never going to happen again because after all we were moving toward something approaching green energy.
00:26:04.000And we could cut our nose off to spite our face.
00:26:05.000We could continue to pump up those dreams while at the same time consuming Russian oil.
00:26:11.000And then it turns out that those resources are still very necessary.
00:26:14.000It turns out there are new types of resources that are going to lead to war.
00:26:24.000Resource wars could happen in the very near future.
00:26:28.000Because again, human nature is human nature.
00:26:31.000And so when people ask what Vladimir Putin is doing, you have to understand that Vladimir Putin isn't doing anything different than Peter the Great did.
00:27:26.000The clash of civilizations was effectively over.
00:27:29.000And it turns out the clash of civilizations is never over because as long as there are different cultures and different civilizations, there will be clashes between those civilizations and cultures.
00:27:36.000And so you will have people like Vladimir Putin who wants to set up effectively an autarky A self-sufficient area that isn't reliant on trade with the West, where you don't have to import the West's values in order to run your economy.
00:28:01.000It's made the lives of literally billions of people the world over better.
00:28:03.000It's lengthened lifespan all over the planet.
00:28:06.000The power of economics is not to be sniffed at.
00:28:08.000And global supply chains are a really good thing.
00:28:10.000Interrelations in trade are, generally speaking, a really good thing.
00:28:13.000But again, the reality is that different cultures prize different things differently.
00:28:18.000And that means that if they can use those tools in order to enrich themselves and then clamp down on their surrounding states in order to maximize their own cultural power, they will do so.
00:28:40.000He wants to be just like Peter the Great.
00:28:42.000He wants to expand the borders of the Russian Empire.
00:28:43.000And if that means that he's going to have to take an economic hit in order to do so, he'll take an economic hit in order to do so.
00:28:49.000And for the Chinese, they feel the same way, which is why they are casting their eyes on Taiwan right now.
00:28:55.000What has happened in the last week or so is that all of the prettiness of foreign policy thought since the end of the Cold War has been blown up.
00:29:03.000I talked about this a little bit last week, all the various myths.
00:29:05.000The myth of an international order led by the United Nations, which is always a joke.
00:29:09.000The myth that economic sanctions were going to dissuade states from taking aggressive military action.
00:29:14.000The myth that you could make soft guarantees to countries and that if they didn't have the ability to defend themselves, they could still rely on you to fill in the gaps.
00:29:23.000And so what you are likely to see is a massive rearmament movement across the world right now.
00:29:29.000Because there are only two alternatives.
00:29:31.000The alternative is either American power or everybody protecting themselves the way they see fit in order to preserve their own nationhood status.
00:29:38.000It means Taiwan attempting to smuggle in or develop a nuclear weapon.
00:29:42.000It means multiple countries now attempting to build up their militaries.
00:29:47.000So maybe you think that's a good thing.
00:29:51.000The only problem is that puts a lot of countries outside the American purview.
00:29:56.000It turns out that America's sphere of influence being very large, America being a global hegemon, has led to tremendous peace and prosperity for Americans living at home.
00:30:04.000If you have a much more dangerous world where people are more likely to fight one another, and that's likely to impact you, not just at the supermarket, But in your job, in your supply lines, in what you pay for, in what you consume, well, that means that America's interests are more difficult to secure.
00:30:22.000A non-American-led world is a more dangerous world for Americans and for American allies.
00:30:26.000Because when everybody goes their own way, it's the Tower of Babel.
00:30:31.000Everything becomes a lot more chaotic.
00:30:52.000Meanwhile, by the way, the White House is attempting to determine whether or not they should take credit, sort of, for where things are at this point.
00:30:59.000On the one hand, they want to take credit because look how we've mobilized the world.
00:31:02.000On the other hand, they didn't mobilize the world.
00:31:05.000So Politico is basically, in advance of Joe Biden's State of the Union address, they're running out interference for Joe Biden.
00:31:14.000They have a piece in the Politico playbook today talking about the magic of Joe Biden.
00:31:19.000If foreign policy crises have a way of reshuffling the priorities of a president, Joe Biden's standoff with Putin happened to come along just when Biden had lost some urgency in confronting his three big domestic threats.
00:31:29.000The pandemic is becoming endemic, there's not much Biden can do about inflation, and the key senator standing in the way of Biden's domestic agenda remains immovable.
00:31:36.000While the war in Ukraine is just five days old, administration officials and Biden allies are starting to grapple with the ways in which Biden's presidency may be fundamentally altered.
00:31:44.000What Biden world is eager to talk about, according to Politico.
00:31:47.000Biden is an Atlanticist who likes to brag about how he stayed in touch with European leaders while out of office from 2017 to 2021.
00:31:54.000He's a creature of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Munich Security Conference.
00:31:57.000He came up in politics immersed in the debates of the Cold War, which are now newly relevant.
00:32:03.000Yeah, I mean, he also was on the wrong side of every issue that entire time.
00:32:07.000Joe Biden has been an idiot for his entire career on foreign policy.
00:32:10.000Domestic policy, too, but on foreign policy, just a disaster area.
00:32:13.000When Joe Biden said recently that the United States will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full force of American power, he could have been lifting the line from one of his 1988 presidential campaign speeches.
00:32:22.000Biden in this view is uniquely suited for the new role that has been thrust upon him, which in the words of Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, is to, quote, rally the West in the face of Russian aggression.
00:32:31.000It was Biden and his team's patience and close consultation with European allies that has led to the extraordinary unity now on display.
00:32:37.000Biden's patience waiting to impose sanctions until after the invasion, even in the face of intense criticism, has been vindicated because Putin would have pointed to preemptive sanctions as a provocation and a reason to invade.
00:32:48.000Oh, as opposed to him pointing to other provocations as a reason to invade.
00:32:52.000So wait, just to get this straight, Biden team is now claiming we are right not to issue preemptive sanctions because then Putin would have invaded.
00:32:59.000I noticed something that happened over the course of last week, which is that Putin invaded.
00:33:03.000So it's hard to say I did the right thing, because if I hadn't done that thing, Putin would have invaded when Putin has, you know, boots on the ground surrounding Kiev.
00:33:12.000One Biden official noted their team learned from the experience of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan when Europeans were outraged by the lack of coordination.
00:33:19.000Chris Coons said, can you imagine a former president complimenting Osama Bin Laden the day after 9-11?
00:33:22.000That's what Trump is doing with Putin.
00:33:24.000That's not what Trump is doing with Putin, by the way.
00:33:27.000Trump was saying that Putin has been clever.
00:33:31.000That does not mean that he thinks that Vladimir Putin is a wonderful person doing non-evil things.
00:33:36.000There's a lot of pride right now among Democrats in how Biden has handled the crisis so far.
00:33:41.000Okay, now there is only one problem with this, which is that Joe Biden has not handled the crisis so far.
00:33:47.000The same day this piece comes out from Politico, there's a piece in the Washington Post talking about all the new sanctions, and here's what it says.
00:33:54.000The actions culminated on Saturday when the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union announced it would bar several major Russian banks from the global financial messaging system known as SWIFT, crack down on Russian oligarchs, and prevent the Russian Central Bank from bailing out the domestic economy.
00:34:08.000The unprecedented moves led Russians to crowd ATMs into desperate bids to withdraw cash and sparked a furious response from Putin, who called them illegitimate and ordered his nuclear forces to a higher state of alert.
00:34:19.000Surprised by the unusually rapid European decision, the White House scrambled over the weekend to catch up in drafting its own related measures, according to one American and one European official.
00:34:30.000We're not going to fight with bullets.
00:34:31.000We're going to choke them financially, said Mark Chandler, chief market strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex.
00:34:37.000So, just pointing out here, that one sentence.
00:34:40.000Surprised by the unusually rapid European decision, Europe is taking the lead here.
00:34:44.000This is just Barack Obama leading from behind.
00:34:48.000And so Joe Biden trying to claim credit for mobilizing the world in support of Ukraine?
00:34:53.000The Ukrainians were going it alone until the last five minutes.
00:34:56.000Joe Biden had been announcing since November, November, that the Russians were going to invade Ukraine.
00:35:02.000And he proceeded to do nothing of real consequence up until the Russians invaded Ukraine, at which point he put in some half-hearted sanctions that did not include the Russian energy sector.
00:35:11.000And now Europe is ratcheting it up and Biden is following suit.
00:35:14.000But that doesn't mean that Joe Biden is the great leader here by any stretch of the imagination.
00:35:22.000And I'm glad that Europe is levying these sanctions against Russia.
00:35:24.000I'm glad that Europe is raising its military budget.
00:35:26.000I'm glad they're doing all of these things.
00:35:28.000But let's just face the prospect that if American leadership had not been weak in the first place, Vladimir Putin probably doesn't do this.
00:35:33.000If Joe Biden does not give up Afghanistan to the Taliban, do you think he makes this aggressive move to take Ukraine outright?
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00:37:19.000So if you love sports, but you're sick of the woke in sports, you're sick of ESPN being MSNBC with footballs, you need to check out Crane & Company.
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00:38:22.000Ukraine knows this is not true, which is why they have been essentially saying to each other, we are now going this alone.
00:38:28.000It's only in the last couple of days that the EU has really gotten active right here.
00:38:32.000And meanwhile, Joe Biden is still not taking the measures that, in a long-term way, would actually make the United States and the West more energy independent of Russia.
00:38:41.000So, for example, over the weekend, the White House actually said that the drive to enhance oil production was wrong.
00:38:47.000They said that if we actually changed our rules about enhancing oil production, that would be a mistake.
00:39:00.000That's a misdiagnosis or maybe a misdiagnosis of what needs to happen.
00:39:05.000I would also note that on oil leases, what this actually justifies, in President Biden's view, is the fact that we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, on oil in general, and we need to look at other ways of having energy in our country and others.
00:39:25.000You want us to take you seriously, as though you are fighting Russia, and meanwhile, you are saying that if we increase our oil production, that's a misdiagnosis?
00:39:33.000And that we shouldn't be cracking down on the energy sector?
00:40:05.000As we talked about Ukraine on the trip, we talked about the fact that the invasion, the assault on Ukraine was an assault on democracy.
00:40:15.000Barbara took the time to talk about assaults on our democracy in our own country.
00:40:21.000Putin was engaged in trying to disrupt our own elections.
00:40:24.000But separate and apart from that, what's going on in our country about The vote and the role that you're playing to fight for passage in the Senate and the rest on voting rights in our country.
00:41:12.000Those numbers are vicious and brutal for Joe Biden.
00:41:15.000And that's the second poll in two days that has him in the 30s.
00:41:19.000According to the Washington Post, Biden will deliver his State of the Union address on Tuesday to a deeply pessimistic nation, one that largely sees the economy worsening under his watch, disapproves of his leadership on key issues, and prefers that Republicans control Congress after the November elections, according to a Washington Post-ABCnew poll.
00:41:35.000That poll finds Biden's presidential approval rating at 37%, 55% saying they disapprove.
00:41:41.000Overall, 44% say they strongly disapprove.
00:41:45.00061% of independents rate him negatively.
00:41:48.000Only 77% of Democrats give Biden positive marks.
00:41:54.000Asked whether they would prefer the next Congress to be in the hands of Republicans acting as a check against Biden or in the Democratic hands to support Biden's priorities, 50% say they'd rather have Republicans in charge.
00:42:09.00049% of registered voters said they would support the Republicans, 42% Democrats.
00:42:13.000For comparison, ahead of the 28-term midterms, where Democrats scored big gains, Democrats had a 7-point advantage on the same question.
00:42:22.000Now, the media are trying to spin this into some sort of victory for Joe Biden.
00:42:27.000They're suggesting that things are likely to change when it comes to Ukraine, that Joe Biden's leadership here is really going to be well respected.
00:43:51.000Some of that was self-inflicted, but not close to as bad as Joe Biden.
00:43:56.000You might have to say George W. Bush because 9-11 happens his first year in office again, exogenous event, external event caused not by him.
00:44:04.000Every problem that Joe Biden is currently suffering from is a problem of Joe Biden's own making and the American people know it.
00:44:12.000Joe Biden Made what is happening right now in Ukraine happen in large part with his pullout from Afghanistan, which he triumphantly announced as a victory, despite the fact that Americans were murdered, that millions of people will starve this winter because of him, that hundreds of thousands of women are now living under sexual predation and tens of thousands will probably be sold into sex slavery.
00:44:37.000That 40-year inflation is not just a supply chain problem, it is a supply and demand issue that is created by blowing out the budget and loose monetary policy from the Fed.
00:44:47.000Every major problem that Joe Biden is currently experiencing, the border crisis, is a Joe Biden problem.
00:44:52.000It has been exacerbated wildly by Biden's ascension to the office.
00:44:56.000All of these problems are Joe Biden problems.
00:44:58.000So when she says he's responding to the crisis, no, Joe Biden is the crisis.
00:45:17.000I suggested a while ago that I would not be surprised if there was a mask removal that happened directly before the State of the Union so that Joe Biden could go out there and say he had defeated COVID.
00:45:26.000Now, of course, that's really, really silly.
00:45:30.000Omicron defeated COVID by getting everyone who didn't already have natural immunity infected, and many people who already had vax immunity natural immunity.
00:45:37.000So everybody at this point has either natural or vax immunity.
00:45:40.000That's because Obamacare has nothing to do with Joe Biden, who's been incompetent all the way throughout COVID.
00:45:45.000More people have died under his watch with a working vaccine than died under Donald Trump without a working vaccine.
00:45:53.000Capitol attending physician said on Sunday, masks will be optional on Capitol Hill starting the day before Joe Biden is to deliver his State of the Union address.
00:46:00.000Because Joe Biden didn't want the spectacle of a bunch of people in the audience wearing masks while the rest of the country is already unmasked because we're already done.
00:46:07.000We've been done in some parts of the country for a year.
00:46:11.000Joe Biden didn't want to look ridiculous.
00:46:13.000And so magically, the science changed just in time for the State of the Union, which of course underscores the fact that it was never about the science for the Democrats in the first place.
00:46:22.000They've been cramming down these ridiculous measures on Americans by the millions, by the hundreds of millions, depending on where you live.
00:46:29.000They've been doing this for no reason other than politics.