Ben Shapiro explains why we may have arrived at the end of Western civilization, and why it s time to go back to the roots of our problems. He also explains why you should not be worried about the White House granting an interview to TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, and how the chances of a Democratic presidential candidate in 2022 will skyrocket if Donald Trump is re-elected are anything like they were in 2016. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast "The Weekly Standard" and host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" on Fox News Channel's HOSTAGE. He is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard and has been featured on CNN and NPR. If you haven t gotten a VPN yet, get one right now at ExpressVPN. You can get an extra 3 months for free at Express VPN. Also, if you don t already have one, you can get all the car parts you need from RockAuto. Rock Auto is a family-owned business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years. They've got everything you need for your classic or your daily driver, including engine parts, axles, clutch, and brake parts. Whether you need everything you ve ever needed for your car or truck, you ll get it delivered directly to your door, with just a few easy clicks delivered to your front door. Be sure to check out Rock Auto on the website. . Rock Automotive is a company that makes quality, reliable, high-performance parts that last longer than your average dealership! and they do it the old-fashioned way. And they re not going to make your car better than you can t afford to buy a used parts from your local garage. or your local shop or they ll make it so you ll have everything you ll ever need to be able to afford to fix your car in less than $10,000 a day, no matter where you go, no frills, no more than $5,000 per month, no shipping required, and they ll ever have to pay that it s going to cost you $50,000, they ll s gonna make it that you ll ll ever get it that s gonna help you a car or your car will last you s gonna need it that ll ll be better than that, it ll make you a better car or a car s gonna last you ll And that s not even need to go anywhere else, they make it like that.
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00:02:37.000Well, folks, we may have arrived at the end of Western civilization.
00:02:40.000I say this with very little sense of exaggeration, actually, because what we are watching right now is not just the barbarians at the gates.
00:02:46.000We are watching the barbarians within the gates.
00:02:48.000There's an entire cadre of people who live in the West who have decided that all of the great institutions of the West must be torn down to their roots.
00:02:56.000They're not really talking about what they want to rebuild on top of that.
00:02:59.000The basic idea is that all these institutions must be leveled in order to presumably make way for a better world.
00:03:04.000But even if there is no better world, the real evil is the institutions.
00:03:07.000It's not we got to knock this stuff down and build something better.
00:03:09.000It's not even the sort of Marxist utopian vision.
00:03:11.000It's just all this stuff hems me in all these vestiges of our civilization.
00:03:18.000All of the West essentially is a monument to evil and colonialism and transgender anti-transgender bigotry and all the rest.
00:03:27.000The idea is that all the rules and the institutions and all of the hallmarks of our civilization have essentially been chains on the human soul.
00:03:36.000And once we break those chains, once we get rid of our worship of the past, once we get rid of all of those rules and rules and regulations, once we do all those things, then supposedly the human spirit can be free.
00:03:46.000But even if the human spirit is not free, all those things deserve to die.
00:03:50.000And you're seeing this as a widespread sentiment that has now bled down from the universities all the way down to the lowest levels of society in the West and then bled back up into politics because that is the way, traditionally, that ideas enter the mainstream of politics.
00:04:02.000Politics is the last vestige of everything.
00:04:33.000And people accuse you of exaggeration when you say stuff like this, of course, because when you look at sort of the bellwether events, when you look at the flag on top of the iceberg and you say this may Be foreboding.
00:04:46.000This may actually bode some deeper ill.
00:04:49.000When you say that sort of stuff, people poo-poo it.
00:05:03.000It is indicative of something broader.
00:05:06.000When you see extremists who do extreme things and then they are cheered for it by members of the media, for example, or when you see people who say and do things that are actual evidence of mental disorder, and those things are cheered by the President of the United States, this says something deeper about the nature of our civilization and the value system that is being torn down.
00:05:25.000And that's what we are watching in real time right now.
00:05:27.000So we have a few of those flags that are atop the iceberg, that melting iceberg of Western civilization right now.
00:05:32.000So the first flag that cropped up over the weekend was yet another attack on a great work of art.
00:05:37.000This time, Apparently, Claude Monet has become the latest artist to be the focus of food-related climate protests, according to the UK Guardian.
00:05:44.000Members of a German environmental group threw mashed potatoes over one of his paintings in a Potsdam museum on Sunday.
00:05:58.000Again, all works of art sit atop a structure of civilization.
00:06:03.000Those works of art are the outgrowth of civilization, and so they are hallmarks of that civilization.
00:06:07.000So you have these German environmental protesters throwing mashed potatoes all over this work of art, and they say, people are starving, people are freezing, people are dying.
00:07:00.000People are standing around and these morons walk into the museum with the Monet painting.
00:07:06.000Wearing orange vests and presumably carrying a canister of mashed potatoes.
00:07:09.000And they just freely do this with a videographer who's taking tape of all this.
00:07:14.000And of course, this is not the first protest like this.
00:07:16.000Just nine days ago, there was an attack on a Van Gogh painting.
00:07:19.000And again, environmental idiots decided that they were going to glue themselves to the wall below a Van Gogh painting after throwing tomato soup at the Van Gogh painting.
00:08:17.000No one here believes that by throwing mashed potatoes on a painting, they are going to magically cure climate change or that this is going to win friends and admirers.
00:08:25.000That all over the world, millions of people are going to say, Those heroes who threw mashed potatoes on the Monet, they've now caused me to give up the fact that coal and gas are more efficient than solar and wind.
00:08:38.000And they know that's not going to happen.
00:08:58.000Again, many of the people who were destructive in the past were destructive, at least you could say this for them, because they wish to build something better.
00:09:04.000These people don't wish to build anything better.
00:09:07.000Because again, the painting is, in fact, there's a reason they're targeting these paintings.
00:09:11.000And it's not just because they're beloved paintings.
00:09:13.000It's because they're beloved Western paintings.
00:09:15.000You don't see them going after expensive objects that are, for example, from colonialized parts of the world.
00:09:21.000The idea is you have to go after the great works of art of Western civilization because those Western civilization pieces are indicative of a broader evil.
00:09:31.000And then you have members of the media who celebrate this sort of stuff.
00:09:32.000You have Eileen Getty writing for the UK Guardian saying, I fund climate activism and I applaud the Van Gogh protests.
00:09:38.000Two climate activists who threw soup on the protective glass covering a Van Gogh sunflowers painting have captured the attention of the world.
00:09:44.000While some have ridiculed the activists, as a funder of climate activism, I'm proud of the bigger conversation they've started.
00:09:51.000By the way, Getty is the daughter of the Getty family.
00:09:54.000I'm the daughter of a famous family who built their fortune on fossil fuels, but we now know the extraction and use of fossil fuels is killing life on our planet.
00:10:01.000Our family sold that company four decades ago.
00:10:02.000I instead vowed to use my resources to take every means to protect life on Earth.
00:10:06.000I proudly provide funding to the Climate Energy Fund, which in turn makes grants to climate activists engaged in nonviolent legal civil disobedience, including Just Stop Oil, the group the activists represented.
00:10:15.000So you now have, I mean, this is, again, Indicative of deeper ills, the scions of companies that were built and created massive wealth and prosperity on planet Earth.
00:10:24.000Now their fourth generation, great, great, great grandkids.
00:10:27.000Those kids are now funding people to throw mashed potatoes and tomato soup on iconic works of art.
00:10:35.000And this is the thing that they are pushing.
00:10:58.000This is true when it comes to any piece of important Western work.
00:11:04.000This is true particularly with regard to really, really important things, not just like great art, but also with regard to, for example, sex roles and the notion that there are men and there are women and that there is such a thing as traditional moral sexual behavior.
00:11:16.000These are seen as things that are the building blocks of civilization.
00:11:19.000All civilization is built on man, woman, child, family formed unit.
00:11:24.000This unit has the basis of all society.
00:11:40.000And our entire society has learned to celebrate the destruction.
00:11:42.000Now, there's a very indicative statement made by Madonna, actually.
00:11:47.000She put out an Insta, and on her Insta, she put a note And here's what it said, quote, 30 years ago I published a book called Sex.
00:11:55.000In addition to photos of me naked, there were photos of men kissing men, women kissing women, and me kissing everyone.
00:12:00.000I also wrote about my sexual fantasies and shared my point of view about sexuality in an ironic way.
00:12:04.000I spent the next few years being interviewed by narrow-minded people who tried to shame me for empowering myself as a woman.
00:12:09.000I was called a whore, a witch, a heretic, and the devil.
00:12:12.000Now Cardi B can sing about her wap, Kim Kardashian can grace the cover of any magazine with her naked ass, and Miley Cyrus can come in like a wrecking ball.
00:13:16.000But at least you could say about the French revolutionaries that they were fighting an actual aristocracy that had prevented people from being able to live in prosperous fashion.
00:13:35.000Because, and everything comes down to, I have a feeling inside me, and anyone who says no to my feelings is denying me, me.
00:13:44.000Any institution that makes demands of me, any institution that suggests duty, or that suggests skill, because what great art does is suggest skill, it suggests training.
00:13:54.000Any institution that says there is a better and there is a worse, aesthetically, morally, Any institution that creates rules for the road and that makes people's lives better.
00:14:04.000It actually doesn't make people's lives better.
00:14:25.000Dylan Mulvaney was a star on Broadway of Book of Mormon, which is a very anti-religious musical that was done by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the South Park guys.
00:14:35.000And Dylan Mulvaney was apparently a talented enough singer-actor to actually be in that show on Broadway.
00:14:43.000Three quarters of a year ago, Dylan Mulvaney decided that Dylan Mulvaney was a woman.
00:14:46.000Now, this had followed on Dylan Mulvaney jumping online at the beginning of COVID and spending a couple of years building up a following.
00:14:54.000And then Dylan Mulvaney decided that Dylan Mulvaney was a girl.
00:14:57.000And so, Dylan Mulvaney started releasing a series called Day Blank of Being a Girl, right?
00:15:04.000And it was documenting every single day being... Now, this is a man.
00:15:06.000This is a grown-ass man who's saying that he is a girl.
00:15:11.000Here, for example, is day one of Dylan Mulvaney announcing that he is, in fact, a she.
00:16:35.000Are women feeling emboldened by this, strengthened by this?
00:16:40.000Or do you feel insulted by this, as you should?
00:16:42.000A man saying that day one of being a woman involves crying three times, ordering dresses you can't afford, and telling people that you are fine when you're not fine.
00:16:49.000If Bill Burr made that joke about women, he would be called a sexist.
00:16:52.000But Dylan Mulvaney is cosplaying it being a woman, and therefore we have to pretend that he is, in fact, a woman.
00:16:56.000Like, day one, we have to pretend that he is a woman.
00:16:59.000Literally the day that he announces that he's a girl, we have to pretend that he is now a girl.
00:17:08.000One of the videos that Dylan Mulvaney has on on his TikTok page is a video of himself singing.
00:17:15.000Got a very nice voice, by the way, singing as a dude and then cosplaying as a woman.
00:17:19.000And then at the very end of the video, you will actually hear Dylan Mulvaney dressed as a woman singing the way that he used to because, again, he is a he and nothing has changed other than the makeup and the garb and the hair.
00:17:29.000So, yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and play that. And I'll see you guys later.
00:18:06.000you Okay, that is Dil Mulvaney dressed as a girl saying, I don't know who that is.
00:18:12.000And then Dil Mulvaney close up singing the same song, same voice, right?
00:18:15.000Nothing has changed, but we're supposed to pretend something has changed because it's about tearing down institutions, about tearing down male, female.
00:18:21.000It's about tearing down reality and factual basis for reality.
00:18:26.000And it is again about insulting every institution that exists in not only the West, but all over the world.
00:18:33.000So for example, here's Dylan Mulvaney talking about being a bride.
00:18:36.000This is a man talking about being a bride.
00:18:43.000I'm 54 being a girl and I grew up as a gay kid not even thinking that I could get married, let alone being a bride. So here are the rules for my hypothetical wedding.
00:18:54.000Whoever I'm marrying, whether it be a man, a woman, a non-binary person, I am going to be the last one to walk down the aisle.
00:19:01.000And I hope that doesn't sound- Okay, fine. So, it's just amazing.
00:19:07.000I'm sorry to break it to you, you cannot be a bride, you're a man.
00:19:09.000Because the definition of bride includes woman in the definition of bride.
00:19:13.000And Dylan Mulvaney, again, being a man, talks in his videos about how he walks around wearing short shorts, like very tight shorts, and people notice the fact that he has a penis.
00:19:25.000Because he's wearing very tight shorts.
00:19:29.000He can either do a painful procedure called a tuck, which involves taping your genitals up underneath you, apparently, or you can normalize the fact that you are, in fact, a man walking around showing your dick bulge while dressed as a woman.
00:19:44.000But I was walking around and everyone was staring and I was like, oh, OK, what's going on?
00:19:50.000And they were all staring directly at my crotch.
00:19:53.000And I went, oh, I forgot that my crotch doesn't look like other women's crotches sometimes because mine doesn't look like a little outer pocket.
00:20:02.000And I thought, okay, Dylan, you have some options here.
00:20:05.000Number one, you can stop wearing clothes that fit like this and just find looser fitting items.
00:20:12.000Number two, I can do a tuck, which is going to have to be a whole other video, but it's very painful and involved of a Or number three, I just normalize it and I wear clothes like this and we all just normalize women having bulges sometimes.
00:20:28.000You mean we normalize men dressing as women and showing their d**k bulge?
00:20:34.000Okay, so the only reason this is relevant is because Dylan Mulvaney has now achieved a wild number of sponsorships from makeup and fashion outlets.
00:20:43.000This person has 8.3 million followers on TikTok.
00:20:49.000And recently, this person did a video for Ulta, which is a major makeup brand, talking about how he could be a mother.
00:20:56.000It was a clip that came out last week.
00:21:18.000You take ideas that carve away at the very fundamental bases of all civilization, and then you treat them as though these are aspects of heroism.
00:23:02.000If your business has five or more employees and managed to survive COVID, you could be eligible to receive a payroll tax rebate of up to $26,000 per employee.
00:23:56.000And so Dylan Mulvaney announced last week, late last week, that he had been invited to the White House to discuss life with the President of the United States.
00:24:08.000And he talked about what he was going to wear, and the answer was he was going to wear effectively a sort of traditionalist skirt suit and sit across from the President of the United States.
00:24:22.000Here is Dylan Mulvaney announcing last week that he was going to go to the White House to interview the President of the, the most powerful person on the planet and the emissary of American values at home and abroad.
00:25:01.000I'm still in shock, and don't be mad, but I don't get to post any of the footage until after the interview airs on Sunday night.
00:25:07.000But it's gonna be worth it, because I can't wait for you to hear everything that we talked about.
00:25:12.000I left with a lot of hope and optimism, not only for just trans people, but many different topics, and the fact that our president has watched Days of Girlhood!
00:26:21.000Because, again, if you're a politician, maybe you hope to channel that into the rebuilding of a better world.
00:26:25.000Maybe if you're Joe Biden, Build Back Better involves leveling everything else.
00:26:28.000Maybe for the Democratic Party, you have to destroy these institutions, because after all, if you can destroy the institution of the family, if you can destroy distinctions between the sexes, if you can posit the idea that all inequality of result is the result of a failed system, then people will give you power to fix that failed system.
00:27:06.000Dylan Mulvaney, a man who has Make up contracts with, again, a bunch of advertisers who hope to apparently demonstrate their tolerance and diversity by showing that a man can be a woman.
00:27:18.000In the most insulting way possible to women, by the way, just acting as a female stereotype because, in fact, a man cannot be a woman and women are not, in fact, men.
00:27:26.000Dylan Mulvaney is sitting there with the President of the United States, the most powerful person on Earth, and given the fact that the United States is the most powerful country in human history, Perhaps the most powerful person in human history sitting across from Dylan Mulvaney.
00:27:37.000And Dylan Mulvaney asks Joe Biden about quote unquote gender affirming health care.
00:27:41.000Gender affirming health care is a euphemism for giving mass doses of hormones of opposite sex hormones to children.
00:27:49.000And transitioning them toward the point where we then mutilate them.
00:27:52.000Where we take little boys or young men and we cut off their penis and their testicles and we form a fake body cavity and we invert the head of the penis so that it creates a fake orgasmal structure.
00:28:08.000Or we take a young girl and we cut off her breasts and we sterilize her and we form a fake penis out of a piece of arm flesh.
00:28:16.000And this is termed gender-affirming healthcare.
00:28:19.000Gender-affirming healthcare, which really should be titled, if we were not euphemistic about it, sex-denying healthcare, because that's really what it is.
00:28:24.000It is taking your sex and it is denying it.
00:28:26.000It is pretending your sex does not exist, and that what really exists, the truth of you, is your feeling inside your head, your actual body, you know, your material body, which is all structured with DNA, which is all structured with characteristics of asex.
00:28:49.000When I say that a thousand years from now, people will be watching this clip and wondering how the United States felt, let me just say that a thousand years from now, people will be watching this clip and saying, how did the United States fall?
00:29:00.000The moral decline of the United States, the moral inversion of the United States, which is really more what it is.
00:29:24.000It's wrong as a moral question to ban, presumably for minors, because this is where these states have actually banned, quote-unquote, gender-affirming healthcare.
00:29:31.000They haven't banned transgender surgeries or top or bottom surgery for 25-year-olds.
00:30:02.000Well, maybe it's because there are people who literally believe That all of the hallmarks of a sane and rational and decent society, things like upholding family or upholding the differences between men and women, recognizing biological reality.
00:30:16.000Or for that matter, recognizing great art, recognizing the value of civilization, that all these things should be torn down to the ground.
00:30:24.000And they're being incentivized in this by politicians, cynical politicians like Joe Biden, who are sitting there, nodding at this in the hopes of political gain, in the hopes of suggesting that anyone who opposes this is some sort of bigot.
00:30:34.000And again, what we'll get here is the face tattoo syndrome that I've talked about before.
00:30:37.000We'll get from the media that the fact that I've covered this at length and the fact that the right is responding to this.
00:30:42.000That is, why are you even noticing, guys?
00:31:03.000The value system that is being promulgated by Joe Biden, via proxy of Dylan Mulvaney, The value system that is being promulgated is being promulgated to children.
00:31:13.000Children must be socialized to these ideas.
00:31:16.000Because if you wish to destroy the institutions, what you really have to do is indoctrinate an entire new generation of kids who are opposed in their essence to these institutions because these institutions make them unfree.
00:31:30.000I'm talking simply about the institutions of male and female.
00:31:34.000Cultural hallmarks of male and female that have been treasured by everyone for all of human history.
00:31:40.000These things must be torn down to the ground and they must be taught to kids.
00:31:43.000Very important to be taught to kids and parents.
00:31:45.000If you teach them to your kids as the left, this makes you virtuous and good.
00:31:48.000This is why you should be taking your kids drag queen story hour.
00:31:50.000This is why you should be taking your kids the drag all age display performance.
00:31:54.000You wonder, you see these videos of drag queens, you know, Very often overweight men in female clothing gyrating around and twerking to extraordinarily dirty lyrics.
00:32:03.000You'll see little kids there and you'll say, what are those parents doing?
00:32:07.000And the answer is what's going through their head is that Joe Biden and his team and this entire spectrum of politicians and moral myth makers in the intelligentsia and in the culture have decided you are virtuous if you tear down these institutions.
00:32:25.000You're a better parent if you screw up your kid on behalf of this perverse ideology because it makes you tolerant and it makes you accepting and it makes you diverse.
00:32:33.000And that's really what we're after right here.
00:33:12.000So CBS did a rather fascinating focus group.
00:33:16.000And CBS, of course, would love to see Democrats reelected in the House and the Senate in 2022.
00:33:22.000And this focus group went wildly wrong.
00:33:24.000It went wildly wrong because there was a conservative on the panel, and the conservative on the panel said, you know what I don't like?
00:33:29.000I don't like any of this woke indoctrination of my kids, particularly along sexual lines.
00:33:33.000And to CBS's shock, the rest of the focus group, which contained a Democrat and an independent, they all agreed on this, including the black mother of eight.
00:34:30.000The children are, you know, they're really influenced.
00:34:32.000You can teach them one thing at home, but when they go to school, they're just as much influenced by their teachers and their surroundings.
00:34:40.000And we should have more input, the parents, of what we want them to learn.
00:34:44.000Stephanie, what's your biggest concern, and if you want to react to any of that, go ahead.
00:35:18.000No one should have to feel as though they are speaking bigotry when they say men exist, women exist.
00:35:23.000A man pretending to be a woman should not be interviewing the President of the United States who is informing this man dressed as a woman that children have a right to be mutilated sexually.
00:35:31.000There's nothing to be shy about in saying any of that.
00:35:34.000And increasingly, people are not shy about saying that, nor should they be.
00:35:37.000Because it's going to take actual people standing at the wall to defend against the barbarians.
00:35:42.000And it's going to take people looking at the barbarians inside our own civilization and saying, you do not represent anything, any ideas that are worth preserving.
00:35:51.000These are not ideas that are good for a civilization.
00:35:55.000And if your ideas were to prevail, it would destroy us.
00:36:01.000We are watching, on an aesthetic level, the decline of the West, for sure.
00:36:05.000We are watching, on a moral level, the perversion of children.
00:36:12.000We are seeing suicidal ideation rates like nothing we have ever seen in the history of humanity happening right now in the West.
00:36:18.000We are watching as fundamental institutions like family and important things like childbearing and childrearing go by the wayside in favor of all of this.
00:36:26.000All in the favor of, I guess, experts who are going to lead us, utilizing governmental and corporate and media power.
00:36:33.000Human beings of all stripes, politically, have a duty to stand up for this.
00:36:36.000Because, frankly, if we don't have this in common, we've got nothing in common.
00:36:38.000Civilization is, in fact, over if we do not have these basic, basic, basic things in common.
00:36:43.000Yes, there is something valuable about the history of the West.
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00:39:45.000Okay, so meanwhile, as I've been predicting, the odds of a Democratic maintenance of the Senate have been declining rapidly.
00:39:52.000Nate Silver is now saying that the Senate is a toss-up.
00:39:54.000He says the Senate started out as a toss-up when we launched our forecast in June.
00:39:57.000After a summer in which political developments mostly played to Democrats' favor, there's now clear movement back toward Republicans.
00:40:01.000The 538 Senate forecast now gives Democrats a 58% chance of keeping control of the Senate down from a peak of 71% last month.
00:40:09.000How to translate a roughly 60% chance into words is a tricky one, since it's right on the threshold of where you might choose to emphasize one party is ahead or that it's pretty close to 50-50.
00:40:17.000Poker players use the term flip when two hands have about an equal chance of winning, even if the chances aren't exactly equal.
00:40:22.000Most players would describe this poker hand as a flip, for instance, even though the pair of tens would win 57% of the time.
00:40:29.000If a friend asked me to characterize the Senate race, I'd say it's pretty effing close and emphasize neither party has much of an advantage.
00:40:34.000Again, Republicans have been growing their generic ballot lead.
00:40:37.000The polls are cutting heavily in their favor now.
00:40:40.000In Arizona, in Pennsylvania, there's now a poll from Pennsylvania showing Dr. Oz up four over John Fetterman, who again is not with us, and whose wife is now apparently taking charge of the campaign.
00:40:49.000In Arizona, Blake Masters is now running dead even with Mark Kelly.
00:40:51.000Meanwhile, Carrie Lake seems to be pulling away in that Senate race.
00:40:55.000One of the big questions here is whether Republicans mobilize around Mike Lee.
00:40:58.000If you're a Republican and you don't wish to see Evan McMuffin take that seat, And then caucus with the Democrats.
00:41:03.000You should go vote for Mike Lee and you should support Mike Lee.
00:41:06.000Mike Lee is a very good senator from the state of Utah.
00:41:09.000But overall, it looks as though Republicans are now in significantly better shape than they were just a few weeks ago.
00:41:14.000And again, part of that is because elections tend to clarify the mind.
00:41:17.000As we get closer to the election, the minds are clarifying in pretty dramatic fashion.
00:41:21.000Not just on the economy, but on cultural issues like the ones that we have been talking about.
00:41:25.000Politico now characterizes it this way.
00:41:27.000They say, Republicans have been roaring back in the Senate.
00:41:30.000Over the past week, polls show GOP candidates closing the gap in states where Democrats have led all summer and perhaps pulling away in races that appeared closed for months.
00:41:36.000In Pennsylvania, Mehmet Oz is an inch closer to John Fetterman.
00:41:39.000Herschel Walker is neck and neck with Raphael Warnock in Georgia.
00:41:41.000Again, Brian Kemp could pull Herschel Walker over the line because Brian Kemp is running heavily ahead of Stacey Abrams.
00:41:46.000Blake Masters has narrowed Mark Kelly's lead in Arizona.
00:41:48.000Adam Laxalt is squeezing past Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada.
00:41:52.000Meanwhile, Republicans stuck in stubbornly tied red states are beginning to show signs of building more durable advantages.
00:42:15.000The momentum they saw earlier this year in their bid to keep control of the Senate is beginning to wane as towering inflation and deepening economic unease supplant issues like abortion rights atop the list of voter concerns.
00:42:23.000Again, that is not a major shock because when it comes to abortion, it is basically going to be back to the state.
00:42:29.000I mean, each state is going to make its own abortion law.
00:42:32.000As people begin to realize that abortion is not, in fact, a federal issue, it is a state issue, and that all legislation will be done at the state level, and as they realize they can do what they did in Kansas, for example, and vote down heavy abortion restrictions, or they can do what they've done in other southern states, and they can actually re-enshrine those abortion restrictions, people are going to say, what does my senator have to do with any of this?
00:42:52.000What does my congressperson have to do with any of this?
00:42:55.000And then, of course, the reality is that the inflation stats continue to be incredibly bad.
00:42:59.000And the reality is that the economy continues to founder on the rocks of bad democratic policy and bad international situations.
00:43:07.000And Nancy Pelosi and company, they have no way to fight this.
00:43:10.000I mean, Joe Biden has no way to fight this.
00:43:11.000Nancy Pelosi has no answer to the inflation charges.
00:43:14.000Here she was on Face the Nation trying to struggle past it.
00:43:17.000When I hear people talk about inflation, as I heard him there, we have to change that subject.
00:43:41.000See if the cost of living is going down for most Americans, how they feel about their circumstances.
00:43:46.000Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, while she's saying we have to change the topic from inflation, she's saying she has no regerts, which again, a neck tattoo, no regerts about the stimulus.
00:43:54.000Well, I mean, it seems like some people have regrets about you fire hosing cash at people for no reason.
00:43:59.000You know, those $1,400 checks, putting cash out there.
00:44:04.000I mean, didn't that end up contributing to inflation?
00:44:07.000Do you have any regrets about the bills you passed and how you structured them?
00:44:11.000No, absolutely not, because that was necessary for people to survive.
00:44:16.000Our purpose was that it was inflationary.
00:44:20.000But the point is that when you reduce unemployment, it's inflationary.
00:44:27.000Oh, so you're saying that the inflation was part of the plan then, Nancy Pelosi.
00:44:31.000When you reduce unemployment, it's inflationary.
00:44:44.000The current polls suggest that Republicans are going to win upward of 30 seats in the House.
00:44:49.000I've said from the beginning, I think it's somewhere between 30 and 40 seats for the Republicans in the House, just because structurally, it's almost impossible for them to win like 60.
00:44:56.000But they could easily take 25, 30, 35 seats.
00:46:14.000Liz Truss lasted less time as Prime Minister than a head of lettuce.
00:46:17.000What exactly happened over there and what exactly does that tell us about the state of the economy and how central banks are running things?
00:46:26.000It was the shortest tenure in Prime Ministerial history.
00:46:30.000Obviously, not exactly a sign of stability over there.
00:46:34.000For a little bit of background, the Trust Administration announced a mini-budget that essentially included $45 billion in unfunded tax cuts and deficit spending.
00:46:44.000And in response, investors expected inflation to surge.
00:46:51.000What we saw was bond rates skyrocketing and the pound sterling hit an all time low.
00:46:56.000Now, the problem would have been manageable with a smaller amount of national debt.
00:47:01.000When you're an individual a corporation or even a sovereign nation if you're dead great exceeds your ability to repay you're at the mercy of the market so essentially it was the board vigilantes or the markets themselves that fired the prime minister now.
00:47:16.000To put this into some context, the UK has about £4 trillion sterling, so a little over $4 trillion in debt, and a debt-to-GDP ratio of around 95%.
00:47:27.000By comparison, we have in the United States over $31 trillion of debt, currently $120 25% debt to GDP ratio.
00:47:37.000So I think this should serve as a start warning to us here in the United States.
00:47:42.000What's happening there could happen here and the markets are powerful forces and not to be trifled with.
00:47:48.000Philip, we're seeing all this volatility across financial markets across the world.
00:47:52.000We're seeing in stocks, we're seeing it in bonds.
00:47:56.000What does it mean for the price of things like precious metals?
00:47:59.000Look, we're seeing a ton of volatility across the markets.
00:48:03.000If you look at the 20 best and worst days in S&P history, nine of the best days, 11 of the worst days happened this year alone.
00:48:13.000I think the reality is we're dealing with a very fragile and sentiment-driven market right now, and that's a problem, right?
00:48:20.000Because the markets are moving not based on fundamentals, but based more, like I said, on sentiment, on feelings.
00:48:27.000Look at the UK is an example right what really settle down the bond markets was the bank of england's announcement that they step in and buy bonds if necessary they didn't actually do it in any quantity but just the assurance alone stabilize things and it's very similar here in the united states every time investors think.
00:48:46.000The fed's gonna give up the fight on the- on inflation every time this.
00:48:50.000Bad economic news every time this the slightest hint of dovishness from the- from the fed.
00:48:55.000Stocks rise again not based on on their value but on expectation.
00:49:00.000That easy money's gonna come flooding back into the market so.
00:49:04.000It's a strange market right and it's being driven.
00:49:06.000A lot of volatility by a federal reserve being dovish or more aggressive.
00:49:14.000It is a very weird market, and it does demonstrate one of the big problems with outsourcing all of your economic policy to the central banks, and the central banks are now the chief drivers of how economic policy works.
00:49:26.000All the Bank of England really had to do to make sure that Liz's Trust stayed prime minister Would have been to actually buy bonds in larger numbers, and that would have been able to sustain the tax cuts that she was talking about, which are actually relatively minor in scope.
00:49:38.000Instead, they decided they weren't going to do that because of the inflationary cycle, and they brought down the prime minister.
00:49:42.000That creates political volatility, which creates lack of faith in the markets, which in turn drives the central banks to exert even more power.
00:49:48.000And this has been a long, ongoing process of giving the central banks such unbelievable power.
00:49:53.000And then it turns out that in the biggest question of our time, whether they could actually keep inflation at low rates, they absolutely blew it.
00:50:09.000But we've got massive obstacles in front of us, right?
00:50:12.000You look at the Fed's ability to raise interest rates.
00:50:16.000I think it's going to be quite limited.
00:50:18.000Volker back in the 80s had to get very aggressive.
00:50:21.000He put the federal funds rate to double the rate of inflation and it required that aggressive action to really curb the inflation that we had.
00:50:46.000The guy doesn't seem to understand the direct link between massive deficit spending and inflation.
00:50:53.000And I think until we can curb this guy's ability to run a deficit, it's going to make the Federal Reserve's job very, very difficult.
00:51:01.000So I think we've got tough times and very little tools to address the problems.
00:51:07.000And the Federal Reserve, which obviously has been ramping up interest rates, is now that they're going to continue to ramp up those interest rates.
00:51:13.000They're talking about a soft landing for quite a while there.
00:51:14.000And it seemed like many of the economists have been late on the ball.
00:51:17.000I mean, six months ago, they were saying there was almost no chance of recession.
00:51:20.000Then they were saying there's like a 50% chance of recession.
00:51:22.000Now they're saying a 100% chance of a recession.
00:51:25.000And how many times can these folks get it wrong before we stop listening to them?
00:51:30.000Are you sure it's a it's a very good point at the fed have a long long way to go people you know they've been raising rates a lot may have.
00:51:40.000But the federal funds rates at 3% for a little bit of context, the average federal funds rate in U.S.
00:52:43.000Bonds, cash, traditionally a safe haven make no sense today, right?
00:52:47.000Rates of interest are massively exceeded by rates of inflation.
00:52:52.000Stocks still, I think, have a long way to fall.
00:52:55.000Price-to-earning ratios are still Third highest in history today not too much value that real estate has been driven by the same thing that stocks have low interest rates of driven prices i think out of proportion to reality so there aren't too many options precious metals at least short to medium term as a tool to weather this storm i think a very appropriate.
00:53:19.000They're very conducive for climates like this.
00:53:47.000That's what I think precious metals do do today.
00:53:49.000And Philip, one of the things that I think people are not worried about enough, actually, over the coming years is not the inflation question.
00:53:54.000As you mentioned, inflation will eventually be brought under control by the Federal Reserve or by central banks all over the world, which have been radically increasing those interest rates.
00:54:02.000The real question is going to be economic stagnation.
00:54:04.000And as we've seen, I mean, the Biden administration was forecasting, even at the beginning of the administration, that within a few years, we were going to be growing at less than 2% in terms of GDP.
00:54:14.000We're now entering a recessionary cycle, globally speaking.
00:54:17.000And as the economy stagnates, that does raise questions as to where exactly you want to put your money.
00:54:26.000Where we are today is very reminiscent of the period 1970s to mid 80s, which was essentially stagflation, stunted economic growth coupled with rising inflation.
00:54:37.000And that's a very tough climate to navigate because if the cost of living is increasing and everything you have is staying the same or decreasing, it acts to compound the problem.
00:54:48.000I think economic stagnation globally Is the big issue today and like I said all roads today at least short to medium term lead me to precious metals and we're seeing it on a central government level we're seeing huge increase in gold reserves a decrease in dollar reserves that trend I think is one individual investors should look at and ultimately follow suit.
00:55:13.000Well, that is Philip Patrick, Precious Metal Specialist with Birchgold.
00:55:15.000Folks, as I've told you before, the people I trust when I invest in precious metals are the folks over at Birchgold.
00:55:20.000Take the necessary steps to hedge against inflation today.
00:55:22.000Protect your own hard-earned money by doing what smart investors do, diversifying.