The Ben Shapiro Show - Preparing For Financial Armageddon

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00:00:09.000 Well, we have been told that everything is fine, all is well, and this is where you insert the dog in fiery room gif.

00:00:17.000 Right, because things are not fine.

00:00:19.000 All is well.

00:00:21.000 As it turns out, there are very serious systemic risks to the banking system in the United States.

00:00:25.000 That's not me saying that.

00:00:26.000 That is Moody's now saying that.

00:00:27.000 And Moody's is late to the game because Moody's was assessing that Silicon Valley Bank was doing fine like a month ago.

00:00:33.000 Well, now they're like, ah, guys, I'm noticing some problems, according to CNBC.

00:00:38.000 In a harsh blow to an already reeling sector, Moody's Investor Service cut its view on the entire banking system to negative from stable.

00:00:45.000 Uh, that's not good.

00:00:46.000 The firm, part of the big three rating services, said Monday it was making the move in light of key bank failures that prompted regulators to step in on Sunday with a dramatic rescue plan for depositors and other institutions impacted by the crisis.

00:00:57.000 Moody's said in a report, quote, we've changed to negative from stable our outlook on the U.S.

00:01:01.000 banking system to reflect the rapid deterioration in the operating environment following deposit runs at Silicon Valley Bank, Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank and the failures of SVP and SNY.

00:01:10.000 That move followed action late on Monday when Moody's warned it either was downgrading or placing on review for downgrade seven individual institutions.

00:01:17.000 Now, that is important because it could impact credit ratings and borrowing costs for the entire sector, which would mean that it would be harder for these banks to come up with liquidity.

00:01:25.000 Which would be a real problem because if the banks can't come up with liquidity, then how exactly do they plan to bail out their depositors if the depositors all come calling at the same time as the economy sinks into the mire?

00:01:36.000 The Federal Reserve has now established a facility to ensure that institutions hit with liquidity problems would have access to cash.

00:01:41.000 But as we'll discuss in a moment, this actually creates a massive problem for the Federal Reserve, which is simultaneously injecting huge amounts of money into the economy or promising to do so, like trillions more dollars.

00:01:51.000 At the same time, it is supposedly attempting to quash inflation.

00:01:55.000 Meanwhile, Credit Suisse has now reported that it has material weaknesses in its financial reporting, which is always a great sign.

00:02:01.000 Credit Suisse said it had found material weaknesses in that financial reporting over the past two years because of ineffective internal controls, according to The Wall Street Journal, the latest setback in its efforts to move past a series of costly blunders.

00:02:11.000 The bank's management concluded that the controls were not effective, Credit Suisse said in its annual report.

00:02:15.000 The weaknesses meant controls around 2021 financial reporting also were not effective.

00:02:20.000 Despite the lapses, Credit Suisse said its financial statements fairly present in all material respects, the group's consolidated financial condition.

00:02:27.000 But Credit Suisse had to delay its annual report last week because of last minute questions from the SEC around earlier cash flow statements, which the bank had revised in its 2021 annual report for both 2019 and 2020.

00:02:39.000 The heads of the bank said that their results for 2022 and the previous years were unaffected by the finding.

00:02:44.000 But this is scaring a lot of people.

00:02:46.000 The bank stock fell about 4% early on Tuesday before recovering to trade flat, having hit a new low Monday on concerns about its financial prospects.

00:02:54.000 Credit Suisse had raised $4 billion in new shares last year.

00:02:57.000 It's cutting 9,000 jobs and spinning off its investment bank, and that has not stabilized the situation.

00:03:01.000 So Credit Suisse could be in serious trouble, according to the UK Daily Mail.

00:03:06.000 Robert Kiyosaki has warned that the problem is the bond market and that Credit Suisse is the most vulnerable.

00:03:12.000 Because any investment firm that is heavily invested in bonds that are about two years old is in serious trouble.

00:03:17.000 That's what we found out from Silicon Valley Bank.

00:03:19.000 Just to quickly review, Silicon Valley Bank had a giant influx of depositor cash.

00:03:23.000 They didn't know what to do with it, so they spent it all on government bonds, figuring, okay, that's really stable.

00:03:27.000 That's not going to go anywhere.

00:03:28.000 Only one problem.

00:03:29.000 It's pretty stable if you hold it until maturity.

00:03:31.000 If you have to cash out those bonds early, meaning you have to sell them on the open market, and meanwhile, the interest rates have increased, the price that you paid for the bonds is now higher than the price at which you can sell the bonds, and you start to bleed money, which is exactly what happened with SVP.

00:03:44.000 Well, the problem is there are a huge number of major financial institutions that did the same thing as SVP, to a more or less extent.

00:03:52.000 And they did so because, as always, there is a sort of groupthink that does take place in financial circles as it does in political circles, a groupthink that suggests that when A carousel is going around and around and around that will just keep continuing to turn.

00:04:07.000 There will be no point at which the ride stops.

00:04:11.000 The game of musical chairs never ends until the very moment that it ends.

00:04:14.000 And then it turns out that somebody doesn't have a chair.

00:04:16.000 On Tuesday morning, Credit Suisse published its annual report that revealed an $8 billion loss for 2022.

00:04:20.000 The bank had been due to publish the report last Thursday.

00:04:23.000 It was sent back to review its books by the SEC.

00:04:27.000 Other Wall Street experts right now are urging caution and calmness, but again, I'm finding that a little bit hard to buy given that a month ago they were all saying that SVB was in good shape.

00:04:37.000 That was really not a problem.

00:04:38.000 Meanwhile, Wells Fargo has now filed for a $9.5 billion mixed shelf offering.

00:04:43.000 A mixed shelf offering is basically a quick way of raising cash.

00:04:46.000 It allows them to offer a bunch of securities, a basket of securities all at once.

00:04:50.000 It could include debt securities, warrants, units, and purchase contracts.

00:04:53.000 Presumably that is a way for them to raise a bunch of money in case again, depositors come calling.

00:04:58.000 So the question is, are we about to experience more banks failing because of those increasing interest rates?

00:05:05.000 Now, the government, of course, is suggesting that it's a lack of regulation that led to this problem.

00:05:09.000 That, of course, is not the truth.

00:05:10.000 There is little to no evidence to suggest that if Dodd-Frank had been on the books in the form that it was in 2018, This would have prevented the collapse of SVP.

00:05:18.000 That was a strategic problem with SVB.

00:05:20.000 They decided to invest in bonds.

00:05:22.000 The price of the bonds went down.

00:05:23.000 It's as simple as that.

00:05:24.000 It had nothing to do with reporting requirements.

00:05:25.000 It really had very little to do with the strictures that were put on mid-sized banks in the earlier version of Dodd-Frank.

00:05:31.000 The guy who wrote the bill, Barney Frank, and who happened to be on the board of Signature Bank, which is the other bank that went bankrupt.

00:05:31.000 You know who says that?

00:05:38.000 Even he was saying, yeah, now if my bill had been in place, it wouldn't have stopped anything at all.

00:05:42.000 And as always, whenever the government creates a failure, their next move is to blame the general markets, to blame the capitalist free enterprise markets, even though it was they who created the incentive structure in the first place, and then step in with more regulatory power. 1.00

00:05:55.000 This is always the stupid game. 0.95

00:05:57.000 You pervert market incentives like you did with the real estate market from 2000 to 2007, 2008. 1.00

00:06:01.000 And then when failure ensues, you say, well, I guess capitalism failed.

00:06:06.000 The government has to step in.

00:06:07.000 It's a beautiful way for corporatism, which is the merger between government and big business, to continue its predations against the free market, which is really what's happening right here.

00:06:16.000 We'll get to more on that in just one second.

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00:07:19.000 Okay, so the Federal Reserve is now suggesting that it's going to change some of its rules and regulations, and that will fix the problem.

00:07:28.000 Of course, it wasn't that the Federal Reserve created this problem with the easiest monetary policy in human history in 2020-2021.

00:07:33.000 It wasn't that the federal government spent more money in 2020-2021 than literally any time in human history by a long margin.

00:07:40.000 It wasn't that that created this.

00:07:42.000 And then it wasn't the attendant interest rate increases that had to come because inflation was a natural consequence of spending that much money.

00:07:48.000 And then people bet wrong on the federal government.

00:07:51.000 It wasn't that.

00:07:52.000 It was that they need a few more.

00:07:53.000 They need more power.

00:07:54.000 If you can give them more power, that's probably better.

00:07:55.000 The Federal Reserve is now rethinking a number of its own rules related to mid-sized banks following the collapse of two lenders, according to the Wall Street Journal, potentially extending restrictions that currently apply only to the biggest Wall Street firms.

00:08:05.000 A raft of tougher capital and liquidity requirements are under review, as well as steps to beef up annual stress tests that assess banks' ability to weather a hypothetical recession, according to a person familiar with the latest thinking among U.S.

00:08:15.000 regulators.

00:08:16.000 Those rules would target firms with between $100 billion and $250 billion in assets.

00:08:22.000 Again, that is the suggestion that if there had just been more government oversight, this wouldn't have happened in the first place.

00:08:26.000 But that wasn't the problem.

00:08:27.000 The problem, again, is that they invested in what they thought were solid assets.

00:08:30.000 Bonds are like, if you go to textbooks, solid assets.

00:08:33.000 U.S.

00:08:34.000 government bonds are typically seen as like the most solid asset.

00:08:37.000 But again, that is if you hold them until maturity, if you don't realize your loss.

00:08:42.000 I've told the story on the show a bunch of times before.

00:08:44.000 In 2007-2008, Warren Buffett, on the books, he had lost like billions of dollars, on the books.

00:08:50.000 Because, you know, he had stocks, and the stocks went down in price, and then they said, oh, he lost billions of dollars.

00:08:55.000 They went to him, they said, how do you feel about losing billions of dollars?

00:08:56.000 He said, I didn't lose a dime.

00:08:57.000 I haven't sold any of those stocks.

00:08:59.000 Until a loss is realized, it's not a loss.

00:09:01.000 Well, that's true.

00:09:02.000 But the problem is that if you have to go liquid immediately and you have to liquidate all your assets, well, then you're going to have to realize that loss.

00:09:09.000 And that's precisely what happened with SVB.

00:09:11.000 They were not marking down their assets to market prices because they weren't intending on selling those assets.

00:09:16.000 And then everybody all at once decided to go get their money from the bank and they had to fill in that gap.

00:09:21.000 So the notion that that's going to be fixed by the Federal Reserve doing more oversight is really quite ridiculous.

00:09:26.000 The bigger problem right now for the Federal Reserve is the simple fact that they are now at war with themselves.

00:09:32.000 So as Bloomberg is pointing out, the Federal Reserve may need to end its quantitative tightening program early to preserve the amount of bank reserves in the financial system while also maintaining its hawkish signaling on interest rates, according to Citigroup.

00:09:43.000 So right now, the inflation rate, as we'll discuss in a second, was like 6%.

00:09:48.000 And it came out that it's at 6%, but the truth is that it's actually, the inflation rate is actually increasing in certain areas of the economy.

00:09:54.000 It's decreasing in certain areas.

00:09:55.000 It's increasing in certain others.

00:09:56.000 The inflation is still really bad systemically in the economy, especially because when you look at the year on year inflation rate, which is what that 6% is, you have to add that on top of what the inflation rate was like a year before.

00:10:08.000 And a year ago, before that, it was like a 7 or 8% interest rate.

00:10:12.000 I mean, inflation rate.

00:10:13.000 So, so if you look over the course of the last couple of years, you're looking at double digit inflation increases.

00:10:18.000 I mean, but one of the things you have to do in order to fight inflation is to suck money out of the economy, right?

00:10:23.000 That is why you increase the interest rates.

00:10:25.000 You make it harder to achieve liquidity.

00:10:27.000 Well, what exactly would you call it when you announce to the world that you are going to set up a fund, a giant slush fund to deposit for depositor backstops?

00:10:36.000 When you are talking about in the banks across the United States, there are unsecured deposits amounting to like seven or eight trillion dollars, like trillions and trillions of dollars in unsecured Investitures into deposits into the banks.

00:10:54.000 Any deposit, technically, that you put in your bank that is above $250,000 is not insured, is not covered by the FDIC.

00:11:02.000 There are trillions of dollars worth of investments there.

00:11:05.000 And now the federal government has announced for SVP, and you would imagine it now applies broadly, that they're going to fill in every deposit everywhere, which is, in fact, a form of quantitative easing.

00:11:13.000 It is a form of the Federal Reserve just blowing money into the system, obviously.

00:11:18.000 Because now, all the risk reward is gone.

00:11:20.000 It doesn't matter what the risk is, you are still going to get your money out.

00:11:23.000 So you may as well put your money with the people who are promising the highest return.

00:11:26.000 That's not according to me, that's according to Citigroup.

00:11:28.000 As Citigroup sees it, the bank's new bank term funding program, introduced over the weekend after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, will create additional reserves in the financial system to avert funding stress.

00:11:37.000 Essentially, that risk is being seen as a form of quantitative easing.

00:11:40.000 Right?

00:11:41.000 Quantitative easing was the fancy name for inflation.

00:11:43.000 We're just injecting money into the economy.

00:11:45.000 At a time when the Fed is engaged in a major effort to do just the opposite.

00:11:47.000 Since mid-2022, it's been unwinding its massive pile of treasury and mortgage-backed securities, aiming to ultimately remove trillions of dollars of excess liquidity from the financial system.

00:11:57.000 The new facility is quantitative easing in another name.

00:12:00.000 Assets will grow on the Fed balance sheet, which will increase reserves, said Citi strategist Jaboz Mafei, Jason Williams, and Alejandro Vazquez Plata.

00:12:07.000 Although technically they're not buying securities, reserves will grow, which is obviously true.

00:12:11.000 This is a form of quantitative easing.

00:12:13.000 They're injecting liquidity into the economy at a time when they're trying to also remove liquidity from the economy.

00:12:18.000 This is the problem that you create for yourself when you create an inflationary problem.

00:12:22.000 And that inflationary problem has real consequences on how people are living, how people are spending.

00:12:28.000 And then in an attempt to jack down the inflationary, jack up the interest rates, that has a bunch of side effects.

00:12:34.000 One, older bonds become worth a lot less money.

00:12:36.000 That was SVB's story.

00:12:38.000 Two, you're going to actually increase the interest rate on the American national debt, which creates significantly more problems in terms of repaying that national debt over You've made the debt significantly worse.

00:12:47.000 Debt repayment gets a lot worse because now you're paying that debt at an interest rate of 6% or 7% as opposed to an interest rate of, say, 2% or 0%.

00:12:56.000 And then you have a third problem, which is you are injecting money.

00:12:59.000 This new program, which is saying we're going to backstop every deposit in the United States, means that you have created a slush fund of liquidity at a time when you're trying to pull liquidity out of the market.

00:13:07.000 So the Fed is now stuck between a rock and a hard place.

00:13:10.000 As Bloomberg says, as part of its move to combat soaring inflation and withdraw the unprecedented policy accommodation unleashed amid the pandemic, the Fed ramped up its so-called quantitative tightening to full speed in September.

00:13:20.000 But for the Fed, an overarching concern is that it avoids pulling back too far on liquidity in the financial system as it tightens policy, creating strains in the markets where banks fund themselves.

00:13:29.000 Bank deposits have fallen since the Fed started its hiking cycle a year ago, spurring customers to shift cash to higher yielding instruments, which has forced institutions to increase rates on offerings like certificates of deposit, more in line with Treasury bills and money markets to stem the exodus.

00:13:41.000 So they've got quantitative tightening at the same time that they're pursuing a form of quantitative easing to prevent these banks from melting down.

00:13:47.000 Well, none of that is going to work out particularly well.

00:13:51.000 None of that is going to solve the problem.

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00:15:02.000 Now again, the Federal Reserve is trying to figure out a way forward here.

00:15:06.000 It's a problem that they created themselves.

00:15:08.000 The new inflation report came out yesterday, and what it found is that the consumer price index rose 6% in February from a year earlier.

00:15:14.000 That is down from the 6.4% gain the prior month.

00:15:17.000 But monthly data showed price pressures persisted in many corners of the economy.

00:15:20.000 Core prices increased by a seasonally adjusted 0.5% in February.

00:15:24.000 That is the largest monthly gain in five months.

00:15:27.000 Shelter costs rose 0.8% over the month, matching the largest monthly gain since the 1980s.

00:15:33.000 So while there are While there are indicators that inflation could be kind of slowing in certain areas of the economy, the answer is not really.

00:15:42.000 So the question is, what exactly is the Fed going to do?

00:15:45.000 So people have been suggesting the Fed has been easing its program of interest rate increases, which, again, they're probably going to have to do that anyway if they don't wish to destroy many more banks.

00:15:55.000 I mean, if all these banks have bought bonds and those bonds are now essentially worthless because the banks because the Fed keeps raising the interest rates.

00:16:01.000 Well, at a certain point, They are going to either have to prevent those banks from collapsing by refusing to raise the interest rates, which means inflation becomes persistent, or they have to continue to raise the interest rates.

00:16:10.000 And if a few banks go bust, then a few banks go bust.

00:16:12.000 That is the choice that they have right now.

00:16:15.000 Also, they've completely blown out their own credibility.

00:16:17.000 First, they created the inflationary problem, saying it wasn't going to be persistent.

00:16:20.000 Then it was persistent.

00:16:21.000 Then they raised the interest rates in order to fight that.

00:16:23.000 They're raising it at half a percentage point every time.

00:16:26.000 And then they lowered that to 0.25 percentage points.

00:16:29.000 Every time.

00:16:30.000 And now they may have to reverse that in 2.5.

00:16:32.000 So it's a mess out there and everybody knows that it is a mess.

00:16:35.000 So in other words, they think that in order to avoid bank collapse, they're going to slow the interest rate increases.

00:16:39.000 take the risk that monetary policy actions could work at cross purposes with financial stability policy by worsening banks balance sheet problems and undermining confidence. So in other words, they think that in order to avoid bank collapse, they're going to slow the interest rate increases. If they do that inflation is going to remain really, really high.

00:16:56.000 Hot core inflation.

00:16:57.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, prices rose 5.2% over the last three months and the annualized rate has run well above economists' expectations and further highlights the tension between the Fed's financial stability and price stability goals.

00:17:08.000 This is why the Federal Reserve should not be in charge of the American economy to the extent that it is.

00:17:13.000 As the Wall Street Journal points out, the real problem here is that as long as central bank policy is bad, if monetary policy is bad, assets that you thought were secure are simply not secure.

00:17:25.000 And so for all those who are saying that the crisis is over, I just have a question.

00:17:29.000 What would make you think so?

00:17:31.000 What has happened that makes you think that the crisis is over?

00:17:34.000 Yeah, I mean, sure, you're going to be able to get your deposits out of the banks.

00:17:37.000 Also, that is going to create persistently high inflation because, again, it's injecting money into the economy.

00:17:43.000 Also, the Federal Reserve is now reluctant to raise those interest rates because they're afraid that it'll dump the economy.

00:17:49.000 So that rock?

00:17:50.000 And that hard place?

00:17:50.000 Inflation.

00:17:52.000 Depression.

00:17:53.000 Those two things are now squeezing in on the Federal Reserve.

00:17:55.000 So, should you feel really good about things right now?

00:17:58.000 I have a hard time believing it.

00:18:00.000 It doesn't matter to Joe Biden.

00:18:00.000 Joe Biden continues to push forward with his idea of a $7 trillion budget.

00:18:04.000 Because why the hell not?

00:18:06.000 We may as well throw some more gasoline on the fire.

00:18:07.000 Here was Joe Biden yesterday.

00:18:08.000 After having supposedly solved our fiscal problems in the middle of questions about whether Credit Suisse is about to go under, the President of the United States went out there and started muttering haphazardly about passing his $7 trillion budget.

00:18:20.000 Last week I laid out on my budget that we invest more in safer communities and expand access to mental health services for those affected by gun violence.

00:18:30.000 Congressional Republicans should pass my budget instead of calling for cuts in these services or defunding the police or abolishing the FBI as we hear from our Maggard Republicans. 0.99

00:18:43.000 This is such stupidity. 0.99

00:18:44.000 I'm sorry. 1.00

00:18:45.000 The Republicans are talking about abolishing the police?

00:18:47.000 Dude, that's your party.

00:18:48.000 But put that aside.

00:18:49.000 He's arguing currently in the middle of an inflationary cycle in which we've had to raise interest rates, thus bankrupting banks.

00:18:55.000 He's arguing in favor of injecting another $7 trillion into the American economy.

00:19:00.000 That is what he is arguing in favor of right now.

00:19:03.000 That makes no sense, of course.

00:19:04.000 Now, the bigger problem, okay, all of this puts aside a much bigger problem for capitalism and free markets generally, which is, I don't know how many times we can create this moral hazard.

00:19:15.000 It's not even a moral hazard anymore, it's just a certainty.

00:19:17.000 It is a certainty that if a bank goes under, the federal government is going to find a way to bail out the bank and to quote-unquote decrease risk.

00:19:23.000 And when they decrease risk, you have to understand, when the federal government decreases risk to a certain bank failing, they're not decreasing the risk, they're redistributing the risk.

00:19:31.000 You are paying for it.

00:19:32.000 So before, the risk was discrete.

00:19:34.000 It existed in a particular institution that had made bad moves.

00:19:37.000 And there were people who had put their money in those institutions because those institutions had been lying and claiming high rates of return.

00:19:44.000 And instead of that risk now existing where it should be with the people who made the decisions, now the risk is going to be redistributed across the entire economy.

00:19:51.000 Because again, the idea is that if we don't redistribute the risk over the entire economy, then the institution fails.

00:19:55.000 And if that institution fails, there will be bleed over to other institutions.

00:19:58.000 Now, nobody's ever tried the counter positive.

00:20:00.000 Right?

00:20:01.000 Nobody's ever tried the idea of what if the bank fails?

00:20:03.000 What if we just let SVB go under?

00:20:05.000 And what if in order to buy SVP, it goes into bankruptcy proceedings or something.

00:20:09.000 What if somebody comes in or a group of companies come in and they refill back in the depositor losses?

00:20:18.000 Right?

00:20:18.000 They come in and they say, listen, we're going to buy it up.

00:20:19.000 We're going to buy it up on the cheap.

00:20:21.000 As we see how you blew this right here.

00:20:22.000 And we're going to restructure this thing.

00:20:24.000 And we are going to, yes, make the depositors whole.

00:20:27.000 Well, why was that not even tried?

00:20:29.000 Apparently they were thinking about it on Sunday.

00:20:30.000 And then the Biden administration was like, no, we're not even going to do this.

00:20:32.000 We're not even going to do an auction for SVB.

00:20:35.000 We're just going to shut this thing down.

00:20:36.000 And the federal government is going to come in and we're going to put our stamp of approval on what we're doing.

00:20:40.000 So Joe Biden apparently can claim that he saved the American economy.

00:20:43.000 Well, all this is just creating a massive set of perverse incentives for future banks.

00:20:47.000 Because if you are a banker now, you're like, I'm going to tell my depositors that I can get them a 10% rate of return.

00:20:53.000 And you know what?

00:20:54.000 If I can't, if it turns out I can't, you know, all that happens is I lose my job and they all get paid off by the federal government anyway.

00:21:00.000 So I'm playing with house money, basically.

00:21:03.000 That is the perception.

00:21:05.000 And that's going to make the economy a lot more risky, believe it or not, because there will come a point in which the federal government does not have the ability to simply fill in every gap.

00:21:13.000 Beyond which, even if the federal government does fill in the gaps, obviously there's only a couple of ways of doing that, and one of them is inflation and quantitative easing.

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00:22:40.000 Okay, so what are these perverse incentives?

00:22:41.000 Well, you're seeing more and more major investors point them out.

00:22:45.000 Carl Icahn, who of course is a major investor worth some more between $17 and $25 billion.

00:22:51.000 He pointed out on CNBC yesterday that the economic system is breaking down because of all of these perverse incentives.

00:22:59.000 I want your reaction to what Citadel's Ken Griffin told the FT about this very issue in which he suggested that the government should not have bailed out all of the depositors.

00:23:10.000 He said, quote, the U.S.

00:23:12.000 is supposed to be a capitalist economy, and that's breaking down before our eyes.

00:23:16.000 There's been a loss of financial discipline with the government bailing out depositors in full.

00:23:21.000 What do you make of that statement?

00:23:23.000 He also goes after the regulator, but what do you think about that?

00:23:28.000 I'll pine on what Griffith is saying there, because I don't quite understand where it goes.

00:23:34.000 But I am saying that he's right, that our system is breaking down, and that we absolutely have a major problem in our economy today.

00:23:46.000 Yes, yes we do.

00:23:47.000 Kevin O'Leary, who you'll remember from Shark Tank, he was asked about the fact that he actually had money invested in Silicon Valley Bank, and unlike many others, he was saying they shouldn't have bailed out Silicon Valley Bank. 0.97

00:23:55.000 He says what this is doing is bailing out idiot bank managers, which is true. 0.99

00:24:00.000 At the end of the day, you can't protect yourself against idiot management in any sector, including banking. 1.00

00:24:04.000 There's always a black swan swimming around in the lake somewhere, and you found it in Silicon Valley Bank. 0.99

00:24:10.000 But here's where we're at this morning with this new policy.

00:24:14.000 I don't care what bank we're talking about anymore.

00:24:17.000 You as a depositor have no risk whatsoever. 1.00

00:24:22.000 So what stops the idiot bank manager going forward from doing anything they want within the regulatory environment? 1.00

00:24:29.000 We shouldn't have done this and now we have the moral jeopardy ahead of us of idiot bank managers everywhere doing crazy behavior. 1.00

00:24:38.000 And here's the thing. 1.00

00:24:39.000 As those idiot bank managers do the crazy behavior, you know what's going to happen. 1.00

00:24:43.000 There will be failures. 1.00

00:24:44.000 There will be more bank failures.

00:24:46.000 And then what happens?

00:24:46.000 The federal government steps in and says, ah, this is capitalism run amok.

00:24:49.000 It's capitalism.

00:24:50.000 It's not capitalism run amok.

00:24:51.000 It's subsidization by the federal government incentivizing bad decision making.

00:24:55.000 It's corporatism run amok.

00:24:58.000 But again, this is the game. 0.98

00:25:00.000 The game is you backstop everything, people take outside stupid risks, the risks come home to roost, they're redistributed over the entire economy, and the federal government then blames capitalism. 1.00

00:25:07.000 That is the stupid game. 1.00

00:25:09.000 By the way, Silicon Valley Bank was taking stupid risks with money. 1.00

00:25:12.000 Silicon Valley Bank apparently donated $73 million to the BLM movement and other social justice-related causes, according to The Federalist. 0.95

00:25:22.000 Apparently they pledged in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the George Floyd debacle, to increase their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.

00:25:31.000 And they also pledged to donate tens of millions of dollars to left-wing social justice causes.

00:25:36.000 Now, is that what caused their bankruptcy?

00:25:37.000 No, it just means that they were loose with their cash.

00:25:39.000 And they were loose with their cash because money was easy.

00:25:42.000 Money was super easy.

00:25:44.000 It's fun to watch Senate Democrats now going at each other over all of this.

00:25:47.000 According to Politico, Five years to the day after Senate Democrats clashed bitterly over Donald Trump's bank deregulation, the failure of two banks is reigniting the old tension.

00:25:56.000 President Biden on Monday criticized the former president's loosening of bank regulations under Dodd-Frank.

00:26:00.000 Biden didn't mention his own party played a significant role.

00:26:04.000 Elizabeth Warren, of course, was blaming other Democrats for having loosened the regulations. 1.00

00:26:08.000 Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado said, no, I voted for the bill because it was bipartisan compromise.

00:26:12.000 It has nothing to do with Dodd-Frank.

00:26:14.000 What this has to do with is if you keep incentivizing people to make bad decisions, bad decisions get made.

00:26:18.000 And then, of course, many people cheer on the bad decision making. 0.76

00:26:21.000 So, for example, Gavin Newsom, the ridiculous governor of California, French Laundrie Newsom. 0.86

00:26:27.000 The rules don't apply to him.

00:26:29.000 Which is probably why, according to The Intercept on Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom praised the Biden administration's decision to bail out Silicon Valley Bank's clients after the bank was taken over by the FDIC.

00:26:40.000 Newsom said that the White House, quote, acted swiftly and decisively to protect the American economy and strengthen public confidence in our banking system.

00:26:47.000 Newsom did not mention that that act also protected his own companies if they held over $250,000 in deposits.

00:26:54.000 There are three separate wineries owned by Newsom for clients of SVBs.

00:26:58.000 So, oops, that's a little awkward for a politician.

00:27:02.000 Now listen, all of this just spells more economic chaos in the future, either through economic stagnation, or through bank meltdowns, or through continued inflation, or through a combo of kind of all three.

00:27:14.000 Which means that it's time for Joe Biden to misdirect.

00:27:15.000 That dude has got to misdirect because if you are looking at the state of the economy and you are fearing a meltdown and banks are starting to bust, then you got to do something.

00:27:23.000 So Joe Biden is going back to that old stalwart gun control.

00:27:26.000 Yes.

00:27:27.000 He's going to go back to gun control and then he's going to tell stories about, do you need a, did you ever wear a Kevlar vest?

00:27:32.000 We're going to do that routine again.

00:27:35.000 So on Tuesday, he signed an executive order he said was aimed at reducing gun violence, including changes that could increase the number of gun buyers subjected to background checks.

00:27:44.000 He said his executive actions were designed to move the U.S.

00:27:46.000 as close to universal background checks as possible.

00:27:49.000 Under the new order, the Justice Department must clarify the definition of being engaged in the business of selling firearms.

00:27:54.000 Currently, a federal background check applies if you are a business that sells firearms on the regular.

00:27:59.000 If, however, you are not engaged in the business, right, you're like a person and you sell a gun to your friend, then a federal background check does not apply by federal law.

00:28:08.000 Now, there are certain places in the country where you still have to get a background check.

00:28:11.000 California is one of those places, I believe.

00:28:13.000 The president is urging the FTC to produce a public report examining how manufacturers market guns.

00:28:18.000 He's trying to open up liability for the gun manufacturers.

00:28:20.000 Again, is any of this going to stop any level of violence with guns in the United States?

00:28:24.000 Absolutely not.

00:28:25.000 There is no evidence any of this will work.

00:28:27.000 But it's an attempt to misdirect.

00:28:29.000 And so Joe Biden is going to misdirect.

00:28:30.000 He's going to go to the gun issue to avoid talking about the economy.

00:28:34.000 When he's asked about the economy, he just jets out that door.

00:28:36.000 When I say jets, I mean he walks very slowly and carefully so that he doesn't fall over out the door.

00:28:41.000 But he has to misdirect to something.

00:28:43.000 Gun control is his big one.

00:28:44.000 He loves the gun control nonsense.

00:28:46.000 So here he was yesterday pushing gun control.

00:28:49.000 Second thing it does is the executive order ramps up our efforts to hold the gun industry accountable.

00:28:54.000 It's the only outfit you can't sue these days.

00:29:00.000 So he wants you to be able to sue a gun manufacturer for the gun working.

00:29:05.000 That's not how typically product liability lawsuits work.

00:29:09.000 This is, again, one of these democratic lies that they tell pretty frequently, which is that gun manufacturers are the only ones who aren't liable for the malfunction of their product.

00:29:15.000 No.

00:29:16.000 Gun manufacturers have the exact same liability rules as every other manufacturer.

00:29:20.000 If somebody stabs somebody with a knife, the knife manufacturer is not responsible for the stabbing.

00:29:25.000 They do not have a products liability suit on their hands.

00:29:28.000 Joe Biden wants to open up liability to gun manufacturers in a way that is not open to literally anything else.

00:29:34.000 It wasn't just Joe Biden pushing gun control yesterday.

00:29:35.000 He had to distract.

00:29:36.000 I mean, he really had to distract.

00:29:38.000 The news is not good for him.

00:29:40.000 And so he then released what I think is one of the oddest tweets I've ever seen from a president of the United States.

00:29:47.000 We'll get to that in just one moment.

00:29:49.000 First, you may have noticed the economy is, um, is really not looking amazing these days.

00:29:54.000 And so if you've been running a business for the past few years, you're like, man, I could use a bit of a break.

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00:30:52.000 My friend Jordan Peterson, meanwhile, has completed the second half of his extraordinary 16-part seminar on the book of Exodus.

00:30:58.000 He is joined by a group of esteemed scholars and me to discuss one of the most seminal books in the Bible.

00:31:02.000 Episode 10 is streaming right now on Daily Wire Plus.

00:31:05.000 It's an extreme deep dive into one of the most important books in the history of humanity.

00:31:09.000 Just listen to this clip between Dennis Prager and Jordan.

00:31:13.000 If you obey me faithfully and keep my covenant, you will be my treasured possession.

00:31:20.000 So, one of the most controversial things I have said in my career is that I don't believe in unconditional love.

00:31:28.000 This is one of my biblical bases.

00:31:30.000 If you keep my covenant, you are my treasured people.

00:31:34.000 If you don't, you're not.

00:31:37.000 That's conditional.

00:31:37.000 Right.

00:31:38.000 Yeah.

00:31:39.000 Well, you know, one of the things we could investigate on that front is whether or not love, in any real sense, can be unconditional.

00:31:47.000 Because if the love is unconditional, it doesn't have an element of encouragement towards an ideal.

00:31:47.000 Right?

00:31:52.000 There's nothing that's discriminating and judgmental in the way that's elevating.

00:31:57.000 Because everything you do is instantly, well, it's all loved.

00:32:01.000 And it seems to me that there's a tension there between what you might describe as the archetype of feminine love and the archetype of masculine love.

00:32:09.000 And feminine love is love for an infant. 1.00

00:32:11.000 It's all-encompassing.

00:32:13.000 And masculine love, you could say, is, well, it's got that conditional element whose design is to further growth.

00:32:21.000 The series is just phenomenal.

00:32:23.000 I was privileged to sit in on several of these episodes.

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00:33:05.000 Well, as you say, Joe Biden has to distract from what is happening in the economy right now because things are starting to get very, very ugly.

00:33:11.000 And again, there are not a lot of options on the table.

00:33:12.000 Either the Federal Reserve is going to have to increase inflation or they're going to have to increase the possibility of bank busts and recession and possible depression.

00:33:19.000 There is no third option there.

00:33:20.000 Those are the only options that are on the table.

00:33:23.000 And so Joe Biden has to distract.

00:33:24.000 And so yesterday he released what is one of the oddest tweets I've seen from a president of the United States.

00:33:28.000 They're saying a lot because Donald Trump used to tweet a lot.

00:33:30.000 Joe Biden put out a tweet.

00:33:32.000 The tweet was a tweet of a small child.

00:33:36.000 I'm not kidding.

00:33:37.000 It was it was a tweet from a it was a letter from a small child.

00:33:40.000 And it said, it's so cute because it's all misspelled and there's erasures and all this stuff says, Dear President Biden, I just wanted to tell something not fair to ladies.

00:33:50.000 Men are getting more money underlined than girls. 1.00

00:33:53.000 Then it's spelled T-H-E-N.

00:33:55.000 I think you should fix this since you're the president.

00:33:58.000 Y-O-U-R. 1.00

00:33:59.000 The precedent.

00:34:00.000 Even I'm a child and I think we should do something.

00:34:03.000 From Charlotte.

00:34:06.000 Okay, so first of all, congrats to Charlotte's mom on getting her letter retweeted by President Biden.

00:34:12.000 No one who spells that poorly has those kinds of thoughts unless they're injected by the parent.

00:34:18.000 You're like, my son?

00:34:19.000 He spells better than that? 0.92

00:34:20.000 He's sick.

00:34:20.000 So I assume this kid's like, five?

00:34:23.000 Maybe?

00:34:24.000 And writing that letter to the president?

00:34:26.000 And Joe Biden, being a cynical elderly gentleman, he tweets out, Charlotte, I couldn't agree more.

00:34:31.000 Women lose thousands of dollars each year and hundreds of thousands over a lifetime because of gender and racial wage gaps. 0.99

00:34:36.000 I'm committed to building an economy where my daughters have the same rights and opportunities as my sons.

00:34:40.000 Well, yeah, he should probably build an economy where his daughter is also able to knock up a stripper and then abandon the child and or snort Parmesan cheese off the carpet and be called the smartest person he knows. 1.00

00:34:51.000 I mean, equity, folks, equity.

00:34:54.000 The President of the United States tweeting out a letter from a small child filled with misspellings in order to promote the notion that women are paid less on average than men is... I hate this foreign politics so much.

00:35:06.000 It's so stupid. 1.00

00:35:08.000 Even a child can see it. 1.00

00:35:09.000 Even a child knows.

00:35:11.000 First of all, children. 1.00

00:35:13.000 They're stupid. 1.00

00:35:14.000 I'm just going to tell you right now. 1.00

00:35:16.000 I got three of them. 1.00

00:35:17.000 They're smart for children and they are stupid for adults because they are children. 1.00

00:35:21.000 The notion that we should take our political lead from small children who can't spell, right? 1.00

00:35:24.000 And be like, you need to be fairer to women, Mr. President. 0.96

00:35:28.000 All children in politics should be treated the way that Dianne Feinstein treated a group of children who came to harass her about environmentalism.

00:35:36.000 It's one of the great clips in American history.

00:35:39.000 The government is supposed to be for the people and by the people.

00:35:42.000 You know what's interesting about this group?

00:35:46.000 I've been doing this for 30 years.

00:35:49.000 I know what I'm doing.

00:35:51.000 You come in here and you say it has to be my way or the highway.

00:35:56.000 I don't respond to that.

00:35:59.000 I've gotten elected.

00:36:00.000 I just ran.

00:36:01.000 I was elected by almost a million vote plurality.

00:36:07.000 And I know what I'm doing.

00:36:09.000 So, you know, maybe people should listen a little bit.

00:36:13.000 That is how children in politics ought to be treated.

00:36:15.000 But the president of the United States isn't listening.

00:36:17.000 He's looking for... I get it.

00:36:18.000 I get it.

00:36:18.000 The economy is in a serious state because of his dramatic mismanagement and because that mismanagement goes directly to his central policy of more spending.

00:36:26.000 And so he's got to distract with something.

00:36:27.000 So he's come up with gun control and letters from small children.

00:36:31.000 Slow clap for this genius, for this broken brain genius.

00:36:34.000 Meanwhile, the media, they have decided And that the real story here, you can always tell when there's a real democratic problem because the first headline from the media is conservatives pounce, pounce, woo, they're pouncing like cats, pounce.

00:36:45.000 So we have some pouncing headlines from the New York Times here.

00:36:47.000 Quote, banks, trains and political finger pointing.

00:36:50.000 As two news events, banking turmoil and a train derailment became flashpoints in America's culture wars, conservative presidential hopefuls and media voices Oh, so much pouncing.

00:37:00.000 So the rule always in the media is if Democrats botch things beyond all reckoning, and then Republicans notice, then the real story is that Republicans have pounced.

00:37:09.000 Now let me just make clear to you, the pouncing is never the story.

00:37:12.000 The story is the story.

00:37:13.000 The pouncing is never the story unless there is like an obvious Strategy to avoid a particular thing in favor of this other thing, right?

00:37:21.000 Then it's really not about the pouncing so much as it is about the thing that they are ignoring, right?

00:37:27.000 So if, for example, there is a situation in which political observers should clearly be paying attention to issue A, and instead of doing that, they pay attention to issue B. The story isn't the pouncing on issue B. The story is they're ignoring issue A. Yeah, but that's not really what's going on here.

00:37:41.000 What's going on here is bad things are happening.

00:37:42.000 Republicans are noticing, and so the New York Times says that the pouncing has occurred.

00:37:47.000 For the second time in two months, news events have revealed how the responses of the two major political parties distinguish their leaders and how the conservative media serves as an echo chamber even for the most improbable arguments.

00:37:56.000 Yes, the real problem here is that people on the right are pointing to woke banks.

00:38:01.000 Now, listen, I've said on the show, do I think that the wokeness of these particular banks is the reason for their collapse?

00:38:05.000 No, I think that their bad decision-making is the reason for their particular collapse.

00:38:09.000 But the fact that the New York Times thinks the story is the pouncing is really kind of incredible.

00:38:14.000 Meanwhile, speaking of a story where people seem to be ignoring the actual story, I've noticed that everybody on the right side of the aisle who is running for president is now very angry at Ron DeSantis for his answer to Tucker Carlson on Ukraine.

00:38:29.000 So, you'll recall that DeSantis suggested that the United States did not have a vital interest in the situation in Ukraine, arguing that it was a territorial dispute between Russia and Ukraine at this point.

00:38:40.000 Now, you can make the argument, I think, That what is happening between Russia and Ukraine now has become sort of a territorial dispute, meaning that everybody acknowledges, including the Biden administration, that the chances that Ukraine pushes Russia fully out of the Donbass and Crimea are unlikely, which means that we are now having a dispute over where to draw the lines in Donbass and Crimea.

00:39:00.000 It was not a territorial dispute when Russia invaded Ukraine full on and tried to take Kiev.

00:39:04.000 That was just an invasion.

00:39:05.000 When you're talking about places that have been held by Russia since 2014, and when there's a full acknowledgement that there will in fact be a settlement in which a line is drawn that is going to be west of the normal Ukraine-Russia border, and that is going to be north of the Black Sea.

00:39:21.000 You're immediately talking about territorial disputes.

00:39:23.000 That's not actually wrong.

00:39:24.000 As far as whether it is a vital American national security interest, I think that what DeSantis presumably was trying to avoid was the blowback from saying that it is a vital interest.

00:39:33.000 But does it actually change policy?

00:39:35.000 And there are lots of foreign policy things that we do that are not quote-unquote vital interests, right?

00:39:40.000 They aren't like top priority.

00:39:41.000 They're second or third priority.

00:39:43.000 Like policy with regard to Philippines.

00:39:44.000 Is that like a vital national security interest?

00:39:46.000 Probably not.

00:39:47.000 Is it something that's important enough for us to worry about?

00:39:49.000 Sure.

00:39:50.000 I mean, that sort of stuff happens all the time.

00:39:52.000 And so the real answer is that DeSantis was mushing it. 0.67

00:39:55.000 OK, when you look at the actual answer that DeSantis gave, it was kind of a mush mouth answer, which is not politically stupid, considering that the Republican Party itself is pretty split on these lines.

00:40:03.000 Now, what is fascinating is to see the response to DeSantis.

00:40:07.000 I think DeSantis' response was significantly less interesting than the response to it.

00:40:10.000 So Nikki Haley is going after DeSantis.

00:40:13.000 She said, President Trump is right when he says Governor DeSantis is copying him, first in his style, then on entitlement reform, now on Ukraine.

00:40:19.000 I have a different style than President Trump, and while I agree with him on most policies, I do not on those.

00:40:22.000 Republicans deserve a choice, not an echo.

00:40:24.000 So what I first noticed here about Nikki, and again, I like Nikki, I agree with her on a lot of things, but one of the things that I noticed about what Nikki is doing is that Nikki is not attacking Trump.

00:40:35.000 So if the idea here is that DeSantis is copying Trump, is the sin the copying?

00:40:39.000 Or is the sin the position?

00:40:40.000 If the sin is the position, wouldn't you go after, you know, the titular leader of the Republican Party, the frontrunner by nearly every major primary poll?

00:40:46.000 Or are we just going to do the same thing that we did back in 2016?

00:40:49.000 And you can see it materializing.

00:40:51.000 We're going to do the same thing we did back in 2016.

00:40:53.000 Everybody attempts to avoid hitting Trump, and instead they hit each other.

00:40:57.000 So, obviously, listen, if Nikki wanted to attack the isolationist position on Ukraine, Trump is more overtly isolationist on Ukraine than DeSantis is, by a fairly large margin.

00:41:07.000 She's not attacking Trump.

00:41:08.000 She's attacking DeSantis, because presumably, the political game here is, if you can drive DeSantis down with potential supporters, then she picks up that support, and she's assuming that no one is going to drop off of Trump who's already on Trump.

00:41:19.000 Okay, but is she really attacking DeSantis' position?

00:41:23.000 Or is she really attacking where DeSantis is in the primaries, right?

00:41:26.000 This is all politicking.

00:41:29.000 It's not just Nikki Haley who's doing this.

00:41:30.000 Obviously you see Chris Christie doing the same thing.

00:41:32.000 I don't know why Chris Christie thinks he's a thing.

00:41:34.000 Fetch is not going to be a thing.

00:41:35.000 You can try to make it a thing.

00:41:36.000 It is not going to be a thing.

00:41:39.000 So Chris Christie has been ripping into DeSantis as well.

00:41:44.000 Lindsey Graham is now suggesting to those who believe that Russia's unprovoked and barbaric invasion of Ukraine is not a priority for the United States.

00:41:51.000 You're missing a lot.

00:41:53.000 And then he suggests that we ought to get significantly more aggressive with regard to Ukraine.

00:41:58.000 Chris Christie said DeSantis sounds like Neville Chamberlain talking about when Germany had designs on Czechoslovakia.

00:42:02.000 Does he sound like that, though?

00:42:04.000 I'm pretty sure that he does not, since he has not called for a full-scale withdrawal of all American support to Ukraine.

00:42:08.000 I mean, that's really the question, right?

00:42:10.000 That's the question that should be put to all of these people.

00:42:14.000 What are you suggesting in terms of actual policy?

00:42:15.000 Forget about the vital interest question.

00:42:17.000 Should the United States withdraw all financial support from Ukraine?

00:42:22.000 Or, how much support should continue to be provided to Ukraine?

00:42:26.000 Because my guess is pretty much all of these candidates, up to and including Trump, would say enough support has to be provided to Ukraine to prevent them from losing against Russia, which is basically what Biden is providing right now.

00:42:35.000 So all of this seems like a tempest in a teapot to me, to be perfectly honest with you, because nobody's actually taking the hard Lindsey Graham position, which would be, we need to fund Ukraine to the point where they can push Russia back to its own borders, we need to give them whatever they need in order to do that, and that will force Russia to the table. 0.62

00:42:48.000 Lindsey Graham's like the only person who's articulating that position publicly because nobody else is willing to take that position because they think it's too dangerous. 0.84

00:42:54.000 And one of the reasons they think it's too dangerous is because the possibility of Russian-American conflict does bear the possibility, however slim, of a nuclear exchange.

00:43:05.000 That possibility went up somewhat yesterday when a Russian jet collided with a U.S.

00:43:08.000 drone over the Black Sea, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:43:10.000 A Russian jet struck a U.S.

00:43:11.000 spy drone over the Black Sea and knocked it out of the sky on Tuesday.

00:43:14.000 It was one of the first military confrontations directly between the two nations' forces since the war in Ukraine began more than a year ago.

00:43:20.000 So, the U.S.

00:43:21.000 and Russia are operating on the margins of the conflict zone.

00:43:23.000 Apparently, two Russian Su-27 jet fighters and the U.S.

00:43:27.000 MQ-9 surveillance drone, originating from Romania, flew near one another for about 30 minutes in international airspace.

00:43:33.000 And in an incident that lasted a matter of seconds, at about 7 a.m., one of the Russian jet fighters flew past the drone, dumped fuel on it, and then pulled away.

00:43:39.000 And then the second jet sought to do the same, but instead ended up colliding with the drone.

00:43:43.000 The collision knocked off a piece of the MQ-9, and its operators guided it down to the water.

00:43:47.000 The U.S.

00:43:48.000 has not recovered the wreckage as of yet.

00:43:51.000 Pentagon said that this was a juvenile incident, but it was an accidental move by the Russian pilots.

00:43:54.000 That would not exactly be a shock.

00:43:56.000 Obviously, Russia has no interest in provoking direct American confrontation in this particular war.

00:44:01.000 But here's the bottom line.

00:44:02.000 There is effectively No broad taste in the United States, right?

00:44:07.000 Including for folks on the left, for direct conflict with Russia.

00:44:10.000 So the question is, what risk are you willing to take in order to promote Ukraine's interests?

00:44:15.000 And how far do those interests coincide with American interests?

00:44:17.000 That seems to be a more complex question than the questions that we normally ask about foreign policy.

00:44:22.000 Okay, meanwhile, in the most hilarious story of the day, this is just a great story.

00:44:27.000 So Wellesley College, Trans men are men. 1.00

00:44:29.000 Female college, right? 1.00

00:44:31.000 It proclaims itself as a place where, quote, women will make a difference in the world. 0.89

00:44:35.000 Its celebrated alum include Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, and Nora Ephron.

00:44:39.000 So they put up for a referendum on Tuesday whether trans men should be able to attend Wellesley College.

00:44:45.000 Now, you'll recall by the logic of the transgender movement that trans men are men, trans men are men. 0.88

00:44:53.000 Clappy emojis, right?

00:44:54.000 Trans men are men, snap it, snap it. 1.00

00:44:58.000 Okay, so there's only one problem with this. 0.99

00:45:01.000 If trans men are men, they should not go to women's colleges. 1.00

00:45:05.000 But Wellesley College voted. 0.61

00:45:07.000 Its students supported a referendum that polarized the campus and went straight to the heart of Wellesley's identity as a women's college. 0.65

00:45:13.000 The referendum called for opening admissions to all non-binary and transgender applicants, including trans men.

00:45:20.000 Currently, the college allows admission to anyone who lives and consistently identifies as a woman.

00:45:28.000 Apparently this means that men who identify as women can go to Wellesley.

00:45:36.000 And women who identify as men can go to Wellesley.

00:45:39.000 So what we are now acknowledging is that the only people who cannot go to Wellesley are men who identify as men.

00:45:46.000 So if you're a man and you say you're a lady, you're a lady. 0.87

00:45:48.000 If you're a lady and you say you're a man, You're still a lady. 0.90

00:45:52.000 And if you're a lady who says you're a lady, you're a lady. 0.97

00:45:53.000 But if you're a man who says he's a man, verboten, this is what makes you a man.

00:45:59.000 So, um, I think somewhere along the line you guys lost the logic.

00:46:04.000 Again, it's hysterical to me that they literally cannot define woman.

00:46:07.000 And so they are trapped into the mutually exclusive position of women who identify as men are still women and men who identify as women Are also women.

00:46:18.000 That is a mutually exclusive message.

00:46:20.000 It does not apply.

00:46:20.000 Again, if trans women are women, and trans men are men, then trans men should not be allowed into a women's college.

00:46:28.000 In a message to campus last week, the head of Wellesley described it as, quote, a women's college that admits cis, trans, and non-binary students, all who consistently identify as women.

00:46:37.000 But now they're changing that.

00:46:39.000 Students held a sit-in.

00:46:40.000 They said that this is bad.

00:46:41.000 The student newspaper's editorial board wrote, we disapprove and entirely disagree with the president.

00:46:46.000 So this makes Wellesley ripe for a lawsuit, ripe for a lawsuit.

00:46:50.000 The next man who decides to identify as a man is going to have a hell of a lawsuit on his hands when he applies to Wellesley.

00:46:56.000 And it's going to be hilarious.

00:46:57.000 Because he's going to say, listen, I'm a man who identifies as a man.

00:47:00.000 But trans men are also men.

00:47:01.000 So Wellesley is open to men.

00:47:03.000 So they are discriminating on the basis of immutable characteristics.

00:47:06.000 This is a violation of Title IX.

00:47:08.000 And I am here for it, man.

00:47:09.000 It is going to be delicious.

00:47:10.000 I love that story.

00:47:11.000 It is so great.

00:47:12.000 Wokeness eating itself.

00:47:14.000 Wokeness defined as identity politics before merit on a general level.

00:47:18.000 Okay, time for some things I like and then some things I hate.

00:47:21.000 So I have some excellent things I like today, like really quality chef's kiss things I like today.

00:47:25.000 So we begin with the Ossendaro brothers.

00:47:28.000 You remember them?

00:47:30.000 So you may not remember their names, but they were the heroes of the Juicy Sommelier saga.

00:47:35.000 There were two brothers hired by Juicy.

00:47:38.000 To supposedly beat him up on the streets of Chicago at 2 a.m.

00:47:41.000 in the middle of a polar vortex after he got a Subway sandwich to pour bleach on him and yell, this is MAGA country!

00:47:48.000 And then he went back to his apartment and claimed that he was a victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime, as it turns out from two of his black trainer friends.

00:47:56.000 And all of that came out, and Jussie has been duly humiliated. 0.99

00:48:01.000 He still claims, of course, that none of this happened.

00:48:03.000 Well, now, Fox Nation, this is one of the better things I've seen from Fox Nation, actually.

00:48:07.000 They released a Fox News original in which they asked the Asindaro brothers to relive the crucial incident with Jussie Smollett.

00:48:18.000 And it is grand.

00:48:19.000 It is just glorious.

00:48:20.000 Here we go.

00:48:21.000 His building is actually right here, right above the stairs that we're going to attack him at.

00:48:28.000 We made sure we got there at 2 a.m.

00:48:30.000 sharp.

00:48:31.000 On the dot.

00:48:32.000 On the dot.

00:48:32.000 We had no phones because he did not want us to bring any phones.

00:48:36.000 He said, so we don't lose them.

00:48:38.000 I don't know if that's really the reason, but you can deduce your own reason.

00:48:43.000 So, 2 a.m.

00:48:45.000 He was nowhere to be found.

00:48:47.000 He was not there. 0.98

00:48:48.000 So we were like, damn, what do we do? 0.96

00:48:50.000 But we didn't have no way of contacting him. 0.97

00:48:53.000 He had no way of contacting us.

00:48:54.000 So we waited here for about, what, four minutes?

00:48:57.000 It was about four minutes.

00:48:58.000 Four minutes.

00:48:59.000 But it felt like forever. 0.56

00:49:01.000 Because it was cold as balls.

00:49:03.000 So I saw him out the corner of my eye, and I was like, OK, that's him.

00:49:07.000 Let's go. 0.98

00:49:07.000 We got to go get this Empire f***er. 0.98

00:49:12.000 Yeah, that's him. 0.98

00:49:13.000 That's him.

00:49:13.000 Is that him?

00:49:14.000 That's that n***a. That's that n***a. Yeah, that n***a. Oh, I love it. 1.00

00:49:19.000 And then they're like walking all awkward because it's really cold outside and they're like reliving it. 0.98

00:49:23.000 Oh, it's just great.

00:49:25.000 And then he describes, one of the Asindaro brothers describes how he gave Juicy a noogie.

00:49:31.000 That's his description.

00:49:33.000 In order to, uh, in order to, you know, make him like give him a small cut on his face.

00:49:38.000 So for the police photos and everything and how they threw this weird bleach concoction on him and shouted, this is MAGA COUNTRY!

00:49:46.000 And it's just great.

00:49:48.000 It's just, it is one of the great stories in American history.

00:49:51.000 And it is a full scale demonstration of why Hollywood is corrupt, because I guarantee you that if this scandal had happened on the right, then this would 100% be a comedy movie made by Hollywood on the left.

00:50:02.000 It is, however, one of the greatest stories in American history. 0.96

00:50:04.000 It really shows you how far we've come as a society when a black gay man is paying other black men to fake beat him up for the publicity. 1.00

00:50:12.000 Because that's how valuable victimhood is. 0.97

00:50:13.000 So just slow clap for the Ostendero brothers. 0.97

00:50:15.000 By the way, 10 out of 10 would watch the Ostendero brothers do a reality TV show.

00:50:21.000 10 out of 10.

00:50:21.000 Their life must be just riveting.

00:50:23.000 It must be fascinating, fascinating stuff.

00:50:24.000 Okay.

00:50:25.000 I have another amazing thing I like today.

00:50:27.000 I love this story.

00:50:28.000 It's so good.

00:50:28.000 So Newark, New Jersey is a pit.

00:50:32.000 It is one of the worst places in America. 0.97

00:50:34.000 It is the armpit of civilization. 0.98

00:50:36.000 It's a terrible, terrible place, Newark.

00:50:38.000 If you have to fly into Newark, I pity you.

00:50:40.000 I've had to stay the night in Newark, which is essentially the equivalent of maybe Dante's like fifth circle of hell.

00:50:46.000 It's a bad, bad place.

00:50:47.000 Anyway, Newark being a terrible place also has terrible leadership.

00:50:52.000 Large coincidence there.

00:50:54.000 Well, its leadership is so smart that they made a sister city agreement.

00:51:00.000 With a country called Kailasa.

00:51:05.000 And they worked hard to make it happen.

00:51:06.000 In fact, they had an entire press conference.

00:51:07.000 It's supposed to be in Indian jurisdiction.

00:51:10.000 Not like Native American, like Indian Indian jurisdiction. 0.91

00:51:13.000 A small country, an emerging Hindu area called Kailasa.

00:51:20.000 Here is the news coverage of what happened next, guys.

00:51:21.000 Awesome sauce.

00:51:23.000 Love it.

00:51:24.000 What started off as a seemingly well-intentioned partnership has turned into a giant embarrassment for the city of Newark.

00:51:31.000 Earlier this year, Mayor Ross Baraka invited what he thought was the Hindu nation of Kailasa to Newark City Hall for a cultural trade agreement.

00:51:40.000 But it turns out Kailasa is no nation at all. 0.98

00:51:43.000 It's a fake.

00:51:44.000 Very embarrassing for the city.

00:51:46.000 I truly don't even have words for it.

00:51:48.000 I'm really sorry for the city that they got duped in that way.

00:51:51.000 Though it has a detailed website, Kailasa has no real government.

00:51:55.000 It's the brainchild of Swami Nithyananda, a notorious scam artist and fugitive from India who has been on the run from rape charges since 2019. 0.91

00:52:03.000 Whose job was it to do a simple Google search, right?

00:52:07.000 As you said, like, no one in City Hall, not one person did a Google search.

00:52:13.000 That is the best thing in the world.

00:52:17.000 By the way, the person who established this Hindu nation is a man known, according to kpel965.com, as Nithyananda, an Indian refugee.

00:52:26.000 He was a Hindu priest.

00:52:27.000 He fled on charges of rape and abduction in 2019.

00:52:30.000 Recently, he claimed that he was developing an airport for aliens.

00:52:33.000 Which, by the way, even for aliens, Newark Airport should not be the destination.

00:52:38.000 No one should be forced to fly into Newark Airport.

00:52:41.000 If this was the plan, to build the alien airport in Newark, I mean, I guess it would make them turn around and go home.

00:52:47.000 So, Kailasa has no official territory.

00:52:49.000 Although there were at one point rumors that Nithyananda had purchased land off the coast of Ecuador and was using that to establish his nation.

00:52:56.000 But Ecuador was like, nah, not so much.

00:52:59.000 Also, apparently Nithyananda launched the Reserve Bank of Kailasa in August 2020 and released its official gold currency, the Kailasan dollar.

00:53:06.000 He also announced travel to his island nation would be available to those seeking to visit him.

00:53:09.000 They would first need to travel to Australia and then via private charter to Kailasa.

00:53:14.000 And presumably where they would be murdered and their money taken or something.

00:53:18.000 But that is just spectacular stuff.

00:53:21.000 So, Newark being run amazingly well.

00:53:23.000 Like really well done, Newark.

00:53:26.000 And to the people of Newark, you guys are voting for the best.

00:53:29.000 I mean, I just got to say, your mayor, Ross Barrett, he must be amazing at his job and his team must be incredible.

00:53:34.000 You should probably give them control over the massive Newark City budget.

00:53:39.000 You probably should.

00:53:41.000 I mean, what could go wrong?

00:53:43.000 What could go wrong?

00:53:45.000 Newark has a budget in the billions of dollars, so probably you should have these people run it, because they look like really competent, is what I'm thinking.

00:53:53.000 Just keep... Newark keeps getting better and better.

00:53:56.000 Life in Newark on that upward trajectory.

00:53:58.000 It's just, yeah, it's going great.

00:54:00.000 Maybe Kylossa will invade and take over Newark and improve its lot, perhaps. 0.97

00:54:04.000 Ah, good times.

00:54:05.000 Alright, time for a thing that I hate.

00:54:07.000 So, Jamie Lee Curtis has a trans child because, again, it is amazing.

00:54:16.000 The genetic bottlenecking that happens in Hollywood is just incredible.

00:54:18.000 Like a number of trans kids in Hollywood.

00:54:20.000 I don't know what happened if there was like an evolutionary bottleneck there, you know, in sort of in the Stephen Jay Gould notion that basically there's like a set of mountains and on that one side of the mountains, all the people with the trans recessive gene went and then they all reproduced with each other and then all their kids were trans.

00:54:36.000 But in any case, Jamie Lee Curtis, who has a quote-unquote transgender daughter, well, she just won an Oscar for everything, everywhere, all at once, forever, for all time.

00:54:46.000 And, you know, she's fine in the movie.

00:54:49.000 Again, I've expressed I think the movie is wildly overrated.

00:54:53.000 It basically won because it was immigrant Asians must accept lesbianism across the multiverse. 0.69

00:54:59.000 That was essentially the theme of the film.

00:55:02.000 So it hit all the intersectional checkboxes that Hollywood likes.

00:55:07.000 And so now she's making statements about how they should get rid of the male-female categories. 0.99

00:55:14.000 How they should get rid of the male-female categories for best actor and best actress. 1.00

00:55:21.000 So here she was yesterday explaining.

00:55:23.000 Obviously I would like to see a lot more women be nominated so that there's gender parity in all the areas and all the branches. 1.00

00:55:32.000 And I think we're getting there.

00:55:33.000 We're not anywhere near there.

00:55:36.000 And of course the inclusivity then That involves the bigger question, which is, how do you include everyone when there are binary choices, which is very difficult and is the mother of a trans daughter.

00:55:50.000 I completely understand that.

00:55:52.000 And yet, to de-gender the category also, I'm concerned, will diminish the opportunities for more women. 0.99

00:56:04.000 That's what we should do.

00:56:05.000 We should definitely... I agree with her.

00:56:07.000 I think we should get rid of all these categories.

00:56:08.000 Hollywood should put its money where its mouth is and then Jamie Lee Curtis will never win an Oscar.

00:56:12.000 Because, let's face it.

00:56:14.000 Every year, there are a lot of men who don't get nominated for Oscars and there are a lot of women who should not be nominated for Oscars who are.

00:56:20.000 If you look at the last few supporting actress categories or supporting actor categories, And put it out there, the supporting actor category is a lot stronger than the supporting actress categories.

00:56:30.000 Same thing seems to be true in the best actor category versus the best actress category.

00:56:36.000 And she acknowledges that, right?

00:56:37.000 She says, to degender the category, I'm concerned they'll diminish the opportunities for more women. 1.00

00:56:42.000 So she's acknowledging that there just aren't enough women who deserve to be winning awards. 1.00

00:56:46.000 And so if you get rid of the genders, then fewer women will win awards. 1.00

00:56:50.000 But she wants it anyway, because why not?

00:56:53.000 That's the really important thing.

00:56:55.000 So, you know, fine, go for it.

00:56:58.000 My answer?

00:56:58.000 Fine, go for it.

00:56:59.000 I'd love to see it.

00:57:00.000 Wokeness should eat itself.

00:57:02.000 Under all circumstances, wokeness should eat itself.

00:57:04.000 And she's not the only one promoting this.

00:57:05.000 Isaac Butler has a piece in the New York Times saying, the best acting Oscar goes to a man and a woman.

00:57:10.000 Why?

00:57:10.000 Well, because, you know, for all of human history, these were a dichotomous aspect of the human species, men and women.

00:57:16.000 And they typically had very different parts because men and women are very, very different.

00:57:21.000 I know that these are like breaking news concepts to modernity, but men and women, different, very different.

00:57:26.000 And so women's parts tend to be different than men's parts.

00:57:29.000 But we're going to obliterate all of that now.

00:57:31.000 So I agree.

00:57:31.000 I agree.

00:57:32.000 Since since everyone is androgynous, we should have men playing women's parts and women playing men parts and everybody's non-binary, whatever. 0.99

00:57:37.000 Then sure, get rid of the categories, too.

00:57:38.000 And we'll see how it works out for the ladies. 1.00

00:57:40.000 The patriarchy, man.

00:57:41.000 Patriarchy is always clever and they win yet again. 1.00

00:57:44.000 All right, guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.

00:57:46.000 You're not going to want to miss it.

00:57:46.000 We'll be getting into the mailbag.

00:57:48.000 If you're not a member, become a member.

00:57:49.000 Use code Shapiro at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.

The Ben Shapiro Show - March 15, 2023

Preparing For Financial Armageddon

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