The Ben Shapiro Show - The Last Republican Sellout of 2022 | Ep. 1637

00:00:00.000 18 Senate Republicans vote for a blowout on a spending package.

00:00:04.000 Church attendance continues to drop in the United States as more Americans move south.

00:00:07.000 And FTX's Fraudmeister is out on $250 million bail.

00:00:11.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:11.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

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00:00:25.000 Well, the Republican Party is absolutely incompetent.

00:00:28.000 I mean, there's no other way to put this.

00:00:30.000 What exactly has the Republican Party accomplished in the last, say, four years?

00:00:35.000 The last time the Republican Party accomplished anything is when President Trump was president and Republicans had unified control of the House and the Senate.

00:00:41.000 And since then, they've been absolutely incompetent at everything.

00:00:45.000 So incompetent That the Republicans in the Senate distrust the Republicans in the House to the extent that they voted along with Democrats by a huge margin in order to advance a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package, 4,155 pages long.

00:00:59.000 And the question is, why exactly they would do this?

00:01:01.000 Why would Mitch McConnell, as well as the other 17 Republicans who voted in favor of this thing in the Senate, why would they do that?

00:01:07.000 I mean, because this is a pretty broad spectrum group of people who voted in favor of the omnibus spending package.

00:01:12.000 It included people like McConnell, of course, but also it included Richard Shelby, Roy Blunt, John Boozman of Arkansas, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, John Cornyn, Tom Cotton voted in favor of it, Lindsey Graham, Jim Inhofe, Jerry Moran, Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, Mike Rounds, John Thune, Roger Wicker, and Todd Young.

00:01:30.000 These are not all quote-unquote moderate Republicans.

00:01:32.000 Some of these people are pretty conservative.

00:01:34.000 Tom Cotton is a very conservative senator.

00:01:36.000 Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma is a very conservative senator.

00:01:39.000 They voted in favor of this omnibus package anyway.

00:01:42.000 Now, Kevin McCarthy, who wants to be Speaker of the House, it is still not clear whether he actually has the votes to be Speaker of the House in the upcoming Congress.

00:01:48.000 He had threatened, along with a bunch of other Republicans in the House, that if these Senators voted in favor of the omnibus package, whatever their priorities were in the next Congress, the next Congress would not take up those priorities.

00:01:58.000 Richard Shelby of Alabama, he said, he's focused on being Speaker.

00:02:01.000 If I were in his shoes, that's what I would be focused on, trying to get enough votes.

00:02:04.000 But I don't think that intimidates anybody.

00:02:07.000 So, what exactly happened here?

00:02:09.000 Well, the answer from a political point of view is pretty obvious.

00:02:13.000 The Republicans in the House are a fractious bunch.

00:02:16.000 The majority that Republicans are going to have in the next Congress is extraordinarily slim.

00:02:20.000 I mean, we are talking about single-digit majority in the next Congress.

00:02:25.000 And because of that, that means that the Republican Party is going to have a very difficult time actually marshalling a majority on many of these votes.

00:02:33.000 Republicans are slated to have 222 votes going into the next Congress.

00:02:38.000 You require 218 for a majority, which means they have a slim four-seat margin.

00:02:43.000 And if anybody is sick, inside the Republican caucus turns into a three-seat or a two-seat margin.

00:02:47.000 When you're talking about a caucus of 222 people, there's a good shot that many of those people are not going to be there on an everyday basis.

00:02:53.000 Some will be back home, some will be sick, some of them are going to just be drunk.

00:02:57.000 A lot of drunks in Congress.

00:02:58.000 Whatever the reason, that slim margin means that the most radical elements of your party are going to have control of the party unless you have very strong leadership.

00:03:07.000 Now, one thing you can say for the Democrats is that they do have very strong leadership.

00:03:11.000 Nancy Pelosi, as much as I dislike Nancy Pelosi, she threaded the needle with an extraordinarily slim Democratic majority. 1.00

00:03:17.000 Now, she of course was working with a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate, so she had a lot of leverage to use. 0.65

00:03:23.000 If it had been only a Democratic House, then it is unclear exactly whether she would have had the leverage that normally she'd be seeking.

00:03:29.000 The Democratic Party also happens to be a lot more ideologically coherent than the Republican Party at this point.

00:03:34.000 The Democratic Party has essentially nobody in it who is pro-life.

00:03:37.000 The Democratic Party is fairly unified on economic matters.

00:03:41.000 They have some divisions on foreign policy matters.

00:03:43.000 But overall, the Democratic Party is left, the center-left has basically gone away.

00:03:48.000 It is left and then radical left.

00:03:50.000 The Republican Party has a broad swath of people, ranging from, if you look in the Senate, people like Lisa Murkowski, all the way out to people like Ted Cruz.

00:03:59.000 And what that means is very hard to cobble together a majority.

00:04:01.000 If you look in the House, the same sort of thing applies.

00:04:03.000 You have people in the Freedom Caucus, and then you have people who are kind of left-leaning Republicans from New York or from California.

00:04:10.000 What that means is that there is no margin for error in the House.

00:04:13.000 And if there is not a leader who is capable of actually whipping the votes, Then the Republicans in the Senate are very much afraid that what you'll end up with is a government shutdown.

00:04:21.000 And this is the thing Mitch McConnell fears more than anything else in life, is another one of these government shutdowns that ends with Joe Biden sitting there and laughing at the Republicans as he waits for their approval ratings to crater leading up to 2024.

00:04:32.000 And so basically what happened here is that the Republicans in the Senate did not trust the leadership in the House enough to say that when you guys take the majority, we think that we can work with you in order to come up with a cohesive strategy.

00:04:42.000 And at this point, McConnell doesn't even know who he's negotiating with.

00:04:45.000 Again, this is not making an excuse for McConnell.

00:04:46.000 This is explaining the logic behind what McConnell is doing.

00:04:49.000 There is a logic.

00:04:50.000 The answer to that logic is that McConnell, other members of the Senate, they should attempt to work with members of the Republican House in order to find a consensus candidate for Speaker if they don't think McCarthy can get the job done.

00:05:01.000 Right now, they don't even know if they're negotiating with McCarthy.

00:05:03.000 Because it is not clear, thanks to Matt Gaetz and some of the other sort of more right-wing Republicans in the House, some more of the sort of Trump-MAGA Republicans in the House, many of them have said that they will not support, under any circumstances, McCarthy for Speaker.

00:05:16.000 And remember, again, he has a four-seat majority.

00:05:20.000 Which means that if five of them say no, and all the Democrats say no, McCarthy ain't the Speaker.

00:05:25.000 And we have this kind of bizarre spectacle right now of a bunch of Republicans in the House who have no plausible alternative for the Speaker of the House saying they will not vote for McCarthy.

00:05:33.000 And so McConnell doesn't even know who he's negotiating with in the House in order to craft a future strategy going into January.

00:05:38.000 So the easy solution for McConnell was we vote in favor of the Somnibus.

00:05:42.000 We assume that there will be no actual electoral blowback because honestly, when was the last time there was electoral blowback to a Republican for spending too much?

00:05:50.000 It just doesn't happen.

00:05:52.000 It really doesn't.

00:05:53.000 The American people don't like spending all this money.

00:05:56.000 And they tend to punish the party that spends the most money.

00:05:59.000 But if both parties are spending the money, nobody gets punished.

00:06:02.000 It's sort of a prisoner's dilemma.

00:06:04.000 If you look at game theory, what game theory sort of suggests is that when you have a situation in which the second best option for both parties, not the first best option, the first best option is you win, they lose.

00:06:15.000 The second best option is sort of the you both, almost you both lose scenario is sort of the second best option in prisoner's dilemma.

00:06:23.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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00:06:33.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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00:08:34.000 So McConnell and these other Republicans are voting in favor of this thing in order to take a government shutdown or a debt ceiling fight off the table for the next year because they don't even know who they're negotiating with in the House.

00:08:43.000 Once again, lack of Republican leadership is an astonishing thing right now.

00:08:48.000 It really is a problem.

00:08:49.000 The Republican Party used to be a vehicle for victory, as I've talked about, because all parties are supposed to be a vehicle for victory.

00:08:53.000 They're not supposed to be.

00:08:55.000 Ideological tentpoles, they are just repositories of political momentum.

00:08:59.000 This is why you see parties replaced sometimes. 0.98

00:09:00.000 This is why you see Donald Trump able to completely hollow out the inside of the Republican Party and just take that sucker over. 0.83

00:09:06.000 Because again, whoever wins tends to have the momentum, can take over the party.

00:09:09.000 But what if there's nobody actually there to create a cohesive victory strategy for the Republican Party?

00:09:15.000 And what if many of the tools that the party used to use to punish people, so for example, punishing senators, At the state legislature level for not doing what the state wanted them to do.

00:09:25.000 That's gone away thanks to the 17th amendment. 0.64

00:09:27.000 Or let's say that in the house it used to be that the party would punish you by taking away your committee assignment.

00:09:32.000 Or punish you by trying to primary you.

00:09:34.000 Now the party doesn't do any of those things.

00:09:37.000 So, when that is the case, what that means is the party has no leverage over you.

00:09:40.000 And all the momentum in the party goes to the people who are on the TV the most.

00:09:44.000 And they have control over the future of the party.

00:09:46.000 Now, the Democratic Party has kept most of its patronage system.

00:09:49.000 The Democratic Party has indeed retained an enormous amount of power over its own members.

00:09:53.000 The Republican Party has not.

00:09:54.000 The Republican Party has basically dissolved all power at the top levels of the party.

00:09:59.000 And what that means is that without any level of cohesion, there's chaos.

00:10:02.000 And with chaos, McConnell and company are just going to look for the easiest possible political solution, which means spending enormous sums of your own money.

00:10:10.000 So the question as to what exactly the grand old party does these days is very open.

00:10:14.000 What exactly would you say the Republican Party does do these days when they are signing on the dotted line on the same bills the Democrats are signing on to?

00:10:21.000 This is not a compromise piece of legislation.

00:10:24.000 It blows out the budget, again, with another bill that no one has read and is filled with pork and is filled with bad priorities.

00:10:30.000 So what exactly does the Republican Party do?

00:10:32.000 It's a serious question.

00:10:34.000 There better be some leadership inside the Republican Party in short order or they will be in a state of collapse despite the fact that the Democratic Party is wildly unpopular.

00:10:42.000 Honestly, I cannot remember the last time a party took over the House and was considered more in disarray than the party that had just lost.

00:10:50.000 Remember, the Democrats control the House right now.

00:10:52.000 In January, they won't.

00:10:53.000 But it's the Republican Party that seems to be on the ropes in the House and the Democratic Party that seems to be in control in the House, which is an amazing spectacle and a demonstration of a complete lack of any sort of backbone or leadership capacity inside the Republican House.

00:11:06.000 So what exactly was in this monstrosity?

00:11:08.000 There's a lot in a $1.7 trillion bill.

00:11:11.000 Again, it was a bipartisan 68 to 29 vote to tee up the measure for debate in the House.

00:11:16.000 A compilation of long-stalled appropriations bills known as nominibus would provide nearly $773 billion for domestic programs and more than $850 billion for the military, covering expenses through the 2023 fiscal year, which concludes at the end of September.

00:11:29.000 This is why you're seeing hawkish people like Tom Cotton sign on.

00:11:31.000 He's saying we can't afford to hold up military spending.

00:11:33.000 We don't want a government shutdown.

00:11:34.000 That's why Cotton, who happens to be fiscally conservative, signed on to this thing.

00:11:37.000 It's for the military spending.

00:11:40.000 Republicans had insisted on robust Pentagon funding in months-long talks with Democrats, who secured some, but not all, of the health, education, labor, and economic spending they wanted.

00:11:48.000 The must-pass nature of the bill, it was the final major piece of legislation before Congress resets in the new year, also offered a window for lawmakers to advance other long-stalled priorities.

00:11:56.000 The sweeping omnibus is filled with provisions that would expand at some Medicaid benefits.

00:12:00.000 Help Americans save for retirement, revise the presidential electoral vote counting process, and ban TikTok on government devices.

00:12:06.000 But you could have done all of these as separate bills. 0.98

00:12:08.000 The whole purpose of an omnibus sandwich is to be a crap sandwich. 0.99

00:12:10.000 That's the entire purpose of it. 0.99

00:12:12.000 Get people to vote for $800 billion in useless spending in order to get the military spending.

00:12:17.000 Or if you are the Democrat, get people to vote for the useless spending and then bite your tongue and vote for the military spending.

00:12:26.000 Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said this is one of the most significant appropriations packages we have done in a long time.

00:12:32.000 He stressed that it, quote, made aggressive investment in American families, workers, and national defense.

00:12:36.000 By the way, you know what it didn't do?

00:12:37.000 Was actually preserve the border, for example.

00:12:39.000 There's no funding for closing the border.

00:12:41.000 Title 42, there was an amendment that was proposed by Mike Lee to maintain Title 42 so at least in the short term we can shut the border.

00:12:47.000 That was rejected.

00:12:48.000 There was, of course, that $45 billion in appropriations for Ukrainian weaponry.

00:12:52.000 And you can be in favor of that and still be very much against an omnibus package that includes an additional $1.65 trillion.

00:13:00.000 Mike Lee said this is an act of extortion being leveraged on the United States Senate right before Christmas.

00:13:05.000 This, of course, happens to be exactly true.

00:13:08.000 Late on Wednesday night, Lee held up consideration of the omnibus as he tried to force lawmakers to extend a controversial immigration policy implemented during the Trump administration.

00:13:15.000 Senate leaders ultimately worked out an arrangement to permit several amendment votes on the policy, known as Title 42, placating Lee, but his gambit failed.

00:13:23.000 It allowed lawmakers to finalize the bill hours later.

00:13:28.000 So, what exactly is in this bill?

00:13:30.000 Well, as I say, there is a lot that is in this bill.

00:13:34.000 According to Politico, Ukraine aid is in the bill.

00:13:37.000 That TikTok ban that was pushed by Senator Josh Hawley that barred the download of TikTok on government devices made it into the bill.

00:13:43.000 That of course is like baseline stuff.

00:13:45.000 Of course the TikTok ban should be in the bill.

00:13:48.000 We just found out over the course of the last 48 hours that TikTok actually spied on journalists.

00:13:54.000 For all the millions of people who listen to the show and who are using TikTok, get it off your phone.

00:13:58.000 They know everything about you now, the Chinese government.

00:14:00.000 CNN reported literally yesterday that TikTok parent company ByteDance had to fire four employees who improperly accessed the personal data of two journalists on the platform, according to a TikTok spokesperson named Brooke Oberwetter.

00:14:11.000 So, this bill prevents government employees from downloading TikTok on their government devices, It creates things like telehealth extensions, which are fine. 0.97

00:14:21.000 I mean, first of all, the fact that telehealth is banned in particular states is idiotic.

00:14:25.000 Of course, you should be able to consult with a doctor who happens to be out of state via the internet. 0.95

00:14:30.000 There is a lobster lifeline, which is exciting.

00:14:32.000 Maine lawmakers successfully included a pause on new regulations they warned would cripple their state's lobster industry.

00:14:39.000 There's also a bunch of tax provisions.

00:14:42.000 There's a bunch of spending on the FBI.

00:14:45.000 Which is kind of astonishing considering the scandal that has now engulfed the FBI in coordinating with social media in order to shut down information about, for example, the Hunter Biden laptop story.

00:14:55.000 So Republicans and Democrats voted for a big pay raise for the FBI, essentially.

00:15:01.000 There is a boost for the National Labor Relations Board, the single worst piece of regulatory oversight mechanism in the United States. 0.98

00:15:07.000 The NLRB is garbage. 0.90

00:15:10.000 Lawmakers increased the budget for the NLRB by $25 million for the first time in nearly a decade. 0.99

00:15:15.000 The NLRB's job is basically to yell at businesses until they do the bidding of Democrats.

00:15:21.000 What else is out?

00:15:23.000 Well, Biden had wanted $9 billion to help combat the COVID pandemic and other stuff, but that ended up out of the deal.

00:15:31.000 There was apparently a piece of legislation that would have expanded protections for pregnant workers that didn't make it into the bill.

00:15:37.000 But there are a bunch of business propositions that made it into the bill, some of which are pretty terrible.

00:15:43.000 So, for example, antitrust efforts could get a boost at the federal and state levels, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:15:48.000 Fees would rise from merger filings.

00:15:49.000 So what this means is more government intervention in the markets.

00:15:54.000 The FDA gets new powers to oversee baby formula and cosmetics and to try to ensure that drugs granted a speedy approval undergo further testing to confirm that they work.

00:16:03.000 Giving more funding to the FDA has been obviously an amazing move.

00:16:06.000 The FDA did a horrible job during this pandemic.

00:16:11.000 Retirees could postpone mandatory withdrawals from tax-deferred retirement accounts until they are 73 or 75 instead of 72 under the current rules.

00:16:20.000 The legislation makes it easier for the president to release heating oil from the federal reserves.

00:16:23.000 I mean, it's an agglomeration of just nonsense.

00:16:26.000 I mean, there's some stuff here that's good, and there's a bunch of stuff here that's really bad.

00:16:29.000 But what this really means in the long term is that we are not getting our spending problem under control.

00:16:33.000 And we are, by the way, inflating the currency in the middle of an inflationary cycle.

00:16:37.000 Inflation still has not come down, and the Congress' solution is, what if we toss another $2 trillion in spending in there?

00:16:43.000 Now this is part of a broader problem that's about to engulf western markets, which is that governments just keep spending and spending and spending and spending.

00:16:51.000 And they can try to crack down on inflation with With their central banking procedures, but they're not going to be able to stop the economic stagnation that's to come when you just spend too much money.

00:17:03.000 As Margaret Thatcher once said, eventually you run out of other people's money.

00:17:06.000 And that is what's going to happen in Europe.

00:17:08.000 Investors are bracing for European governments led by Germany to flood the market with new debt next year as they spend heavily to shield their economies from high energy costs, according to the Wall Street Journal.

00:17:16.000 Governments in Europe are expected to increase bond issuance by 10% to 1.2 trillion euros in 2023.

00:17:22.000 It's equivalent to about 1.27 trillion dollars.

00:17:25.000 That comes as the European Central Bank steps back from its role as a voracious buyer of eurozone government bonds, with plans to start shrinking its bond portfolio starting in March.

00:17:34.000 So this flood of new debt from Germany and other eurozone countries means that they are going to start issuing more debt.

00:17:41.000 It means that you're going to see larger debt and deficits.

00:17:44.000 And this means, in the end, economic stagnation.

00:17:47.000 It also means in the United States, when you look at the measures that the White House is currently taking, when you spend this much money, and when you encourage people not to work, what you end up is less people in the workforce.

00:17:56.000 Which means that by all democratic governing strategies, when you have created a piece of policy that fails, you then create a piggyback piece of policy that also fails.

00:18:04.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, top White House economic officials are considering a renewed push for a suite of policies aimed at luring more Americans back to work.

00:18:11.000 You know what we used to call it?

00:18:12.000 To lure Americans back to work, paying them a salary. 0.93

00:18:15.000 It used to be in this country.

00:18:16.000 You didn't have to lure people back to work.

00:18:17.000 People looked for work in this country.

00:18:19.000 I have to lure people?

00:18:20.000 Like, what bizarre notion of markets is it that you lure people to work?

00:18:25.000 The lure was the pay.

00:18:26.000 You don't have to have the government luring people back to work unless the government is also paying people to stay home.

00:18:30.000 So there's a quick solution for that.

00:18:31.000 Stop paying people to stay home.

00:18:34.000 So what exactly is the White House going to do?

00:18:36.000 They're now talking about an enhanced child care and elder care benefit as they hammer out priorities for the coming year.

00:18:42.000 The question of how to find enough workers has emerged as a significant issue as the country emerges from the pandemic, with a smaller share of adults working or looking for work than in early 2020.

00:18:49.000 White House economic officials expect to brief President Biden on their thoughts over the holiday break as the administration shapes its agenda for 2023 and plans for Biden's State of the Union address.

00:18:58.000 Brian Deese, director of the White House's National Economic Council, said to the Wall Street Journal, Where are places where we can lower price pressures on the economy, lower costs for consumers, increase the productive potential of the economy?

00:19:07.000 The things we prioritize and focus on will be in that area.

00:19:10.000 He didn't make clear exactly what that would look like, but the White House is going to push for paid family leave, universal pre-K, permanent expansion of the child tax credit, etc. 0.97

00:19:20.000 So again, the idea is going to be that we are going to give you additional benefits from the government side if you go to work, as opposed to, you know, taking away the benefits that we are currently giving you to stay home and sit flat on your ass for years on end. 0.79

00:19:32.000 Which means more spending, of course, and forever. 0.95

00:19:35.000 Will Republicans actually stand up to that?

00:19:37.000 Totally unclear.

00:19:39.000 Because, I mean, let's be real about this.

00:19:41.000 If what we just saw in the Senate Republicans voting for an omnibus package with Democrats in order to avoid negotiating with Republicans, there's no reason they can't do that next year.

00:19:48.000 If the Republicans take over Congress, and if the new Speaker, whoever it is, Kevin McCarthy or anybody else, is unable to wield a durable majority in the House, you could see a bunch of Republicans just peel off and vote with the Democrats and start advancing Joe Biden's priorities.

00:20:00.000 That's how weak the party is right now.

00:20:03.000 Now the predictable result of all of this is that you are going to have a stagnating economy in the very near future.

00:20:09.000 The U.S.

00:20:10.000 labor market continues to remain very tight because, again, we spent trillions of dollars to keep people at home.

00:20:15.000 People continue to spend money.

00:20:16.000 This continues to drive up the inflation rates, which is going to mean that the Federal Reserve has to drive down all of the inflation rates through higher interest rates.

00:20:25.000 Which is going to mean long-term economic stagnation.

00:20:27.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

00:20:29.000 First, the situation in Ukraine obviously continues to be a disaster area.

00:20:32.000 Russia has actually upped the ante, given the fact they're not doing particularly well in the field.

00:20:36.000 They are now striking out at the electrical grid in Ukraine, so things are getting uglier.

00:20:39.000 My friends at the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews have been working in Israel, Ukraine, and the former Soviet Union for more than 30 years.

00:20:45.000 They've never seen hunger and suffering like they are currently seeing in Ukraine, which is just one reason I'm asking for your help.

00:20:50.000 Norman is an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor.

00:20:52.000 He's been blind since birth and lives in a Jewish old-age home in Odessa, Ukraine.

00:20:55.000 With so much infrastructure destroyed over recent months, Norman has been without heat or clean water.

00:20:59.000 The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has supplied blankets, foods, and other essentials to help Norman survive through the winter.

00:21:05.000 They're doing this for hundreds, if not thousands, of other people as well.

00:21:07.000 In this season of giving, please consider donating to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews.

00:21:12.000 They're on the ground providing generators, building wells, providing medicine and food boxes in this dire situation.

00:21:16.000 Just 45 bucks can ensure warmth, food, and clean water to Jewish kids and the elderly in need.

00:21:20.000 Right now, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews has a special matching challenge.

00:21:24.000 Your donation through the end of 2022 will double in impact.

00:21:27.000 Your tax-deductible gift will be multiplied twice to help provide twice the winter necessities and save lives.

00:21:31.000 Head online to benforthefellowship.org or TechShapiro to 41444.

00:21:35.000 That's benforthefellowship.org or TechShapiro to 41444.

00:21:40.000 This is the direction in which the economy is going to move.

00:21:42.000 And Democrats can't stop, won't stop.

00:21:44.000 They're going to continue to push broader spending initiatives that please their most ardent fans.

00:21:50.000 This is why, for example, Rashid Tlaib and Cori Bush are still out there doing TikTok dances in order to encourage Joe Biden to cancel student loan debt.

00:21:57.000 And if you think that Joe Biden won't try it again, he will.

00:21:59.000 Oh no.

00:22:07.000 Yeah.

00:22:08.000 Nothing worse than Congress people doing TikTok.

00:22:10.000 I mean, first of all, no one should ever do TikTok dances.

00:22:13.000 Are you an adult?

00:22:14.000 Be an adult.

00:22:15.000 But aside from that, also you shouldn't be on TikTok because they're going to steal all your data.

00:22:18.000 So you have Congress people on TikTok giving their data to the Chinese while doing videos about canceling student loan debt. 0.52

00:22:25.000 Both of those people, I believe, went to college, which is a good reason why you should never relieve their student loan debt.

00:22:30.000 Ever, ever, ever.

00:22:32.000 And again, the Democrats will continue to pursue really bad policy.

00:22:35.000 The question is, do the Republicans have any power to stand up to it?

00:22:38.000 One of the funniest things about the Democrats' bad policy, by the way, is that they have to spend a lot of time pretending that the bad policy doesn't actually exist.

00:22:44.000 So Mayor Eric Adams is about to be hit with 1,000 illegal immigrants a day once Title 42 ends.

00:22:50.000 And this is what New York City is actually foreseeing.

00:22:52.000 He says that Joe Biden is doing fine on the border.

00:22:55.000 Things are great.

00:22:57.000 Chuck Schumer, New York Senator, managed to negotiate an increase from $150 million to $800 million for the cities that receive asylum seekers.

00:23:06.000 And we're told, according to multiple sources, that New York City is positioned to receive a large batch of that amount.

00:23:12.000 So here's New York City Mayor Eric Adams responding to that news this week.

00:23:16.000 I think the president has a good understanding of how this is a real issue.

00:23:23.000 We were able to get this omnibus bill.

00:23:25.000 It has the money in it that we need, some of the money that we need.

00:23:31.000 This is a national issue.

00:23:32.000 And that's my conversation with the president's team.

00:23:36.000 So this is the same mayor who is yelling at Greg Abbott for shipping a few illegal immigrants up to New York City.

00:23:41.000 But he's saying that Joe Biden is doing an amazing job.

00:23:43.000 Listen, there are gaps in the Biden Democrat policy wide enough to drive a Mack truck through.

00:23:47.000 Joe Biden's approval rating right now is in the low 40s at best.

00:23:51.000 And yet Republicans seem utterly incapable of taking advantage of that.

00:23:54.000 Now one reason for that, of course, is that the media are completely in the pocket of Democrats.

00:23:57.000 Nancy Pelosi, who is now leaving her position as Speaker of the House, she won't be the House Minority Leader either.

00:24:02.000 Hakeem Jeffries is about to take that over.

00:24:04.000 She gave her last weekly press briefing yesterday as Speaker of the House with apparently a bunch of crumbs on her jacket or something. 1.00

00:24:13.000 The hobbitses took the last of the lambless bread.

00:24:19.000 by Nancy Pelosi.

00:24:20.000 She actually, this is my favorite thing about the relationship between Democrats and their Praetorian Guard is that they don't even pretend that the reporters aren't their best friends.

00:24:28.000 It's really funny.

00:24:29.000 Republicans deal with reporters and they're like, God, you guys are just, I understand your opposition and we'll treat each other respectfully, but I'm going to call you out on your nonsense.

00:24:37.000 Democrats are like, go forward and do the work of the people.

00:24:40.000 They turn into, they turn into like Mr. Chips at the end of Goodbye Mr. Chips, just giving Here's Nancy Pelosi explaining to the media that they do an amazing job.

00:24:52.000 As you know, this is my this I thought last week might have been, but this is my final weekly press conference.

00:24:58.000 And some of you have been covering Congress for a long time.

00:25:00.000 Others are new.

00:25:02.000 All of you are guardians of democracy.

00:25:05.000 You've heard me say again and again, if there were one freedom in the First Amendment, the freedom of the press, that would be the one that protects and defends all the other freedoms.

00:25:17.000 It must be wonderful being a Democrat when you have an entire legacy media dedicated to your preservation and glorification.

00:25:23.000 It must be just absolutely wonderful.

00:25:25.000 And that's why you're able to move forward with Terrible policy, repeatedly.

00:25:28.000 Now, the Democrats don't just rely on the media in order to push forward their policy.

00:25:32.000 They have a bunch of forces working in their favor.

00:25:33.000 One, Republican incompetence.

00:25:34.000 Two, the media being their absolute best friends.

00:25:37.000 And three, the ability to misdirect because of one and two, to issues that do not actually take top priority for the American people, but they can spend inordinate amounts of time on.

00:25:46.000 So Joe Biden made his Christmas address the other night.

00:25:50.000 You know, he's able to mix religion and politics so long as the religion is so watered down that it doesn't actually hold by anything.

00:25:57.000 This is the rule in American politics, is you're allowed to make religious appeals, but only to things that have nothing to do with religion, or to a vague sort of spirituality that has nothing to do with the actual gospel if you're Christian, for example.

00:26:07.000 So Joe Biden, He used Christmas as a time to talk up what a unifying man he was.

00:26:12.000 I noticed that he wasn't in front of Independence Hall yelling at his political opponents and calling them fascists this time, while calling for unity.

00:26:18.000 Instead, he was in front of a bunch of twinkly lights over at the White House and explaining that he was a very unifying, unifying man.

00:26:24.000 I sincerely hope this holiday season will drain the poison that has infected our politics and set us against one another.

00:26:32.000 I hope this Christmas season marks a fresh start for our nation.

00:26:37.000 Because there's so much that unites us as Americans.

00:26:40.000 Well, actually, there is increasingly little that unites us as Americans.

00:26:44.000 This is actually what the Census Bureau is now showing.

00:26:46.000 There are a couple of pieces of data that have come out in the last 24 hours showing that when it comes to the fundamental bases upon which we predicate our social fabric, many of these things are wearing away.

00:26:55.000 And this is why you are seeing a big sort happening in American life.

00:26:57.000 So there's a certain irony to Joe Biden, who's a deeply anti-religious figure.

00:27:01.000 I mean, if you look at his social policy, transing the children, same-sex marriage, these are policies that are directed against traditional religion.

00:27:10.000 There's a president who has suggested that basically, if you're a traditionally religious person, your religious practice needs to end at the front door of your home or at the side door of your church.

00:27:19.000 That's where your religious practice ends.

00:27:20.000 And even there, he's basically saying we can do that for now, but not for very long.

00:27:25.000 He's banking on the fact that in the United States, church attendance has been dropping, that religious adherence has been dropping.

00:27:30.000 Because if you get rid of the church, then the God becomes the state. 0.97

00:27:34.000 These two things tend to merge.

00:27:35.000 Human beings have religious impulse.

00:27:37.000 They want to follow something.

00:27:38.000 And Joe Biden believes that what people should follow is the moral suasion of government.

00:27:43.000 And so he does have some forces working in his favor here, including the lack of religious traditionalism in America right now.

00:27:49.000 According to Hannah Blow reporting for Breitbart, church attendance and general belief in God has dropped in the United States over the past few years, according to recent surveys.

00:27:57.000 A Gallup survey released over the summer found that belief in God sunk to an all-time low this year, down to 81%.

00:28:02.000 It identified young individuals and leftists as the people most likely to not believe in God.

00:28:06.000 It works the other way around, by the way.

00:28:07.000 The people who are most likely not to believe in God tend to be leftists.

00:28:11.000 It's not just the leftists don't believe in God.

00:28:12.000 It's people who don't believe in God tend to move toward the left.

00:28:16.000 As Breitbart reported at the time, according to the survey, most U.S.

00:28:18.000 adults, 81%, believe in God.

00:28:20.000 While that figure seems high, it's the lowest percentage ever recorded in the survey.

00:28:23.000 Also, there are a lot of people who say they believe in God, but what they mean by believe in God is they believe in vague spiritual forces and sort of the C.S.

00:28:29.000 Lewis description of the term.

00:28:30.000 Up until 2011, over 90% of Americans said they believed in God.

00:28:34.000 The number has continued to drop.

00:28:35.000 It's now down eight points from 89% to express belief in God in 2016, which is a radical decrease.

00:28:40.000 You're talking about a 10% decrease in just the last 10 years.

00:28:43.000 The previous low was set in 2014 when 86% said they believed in God.

00:28:48.000 When Gallup asked the same question in 1953, 54, 65, 67, 98% said they believed in God.

00:28:54.000 Also, the Hill found roughly one-fifth of Americans do not consider themselves part of a religion.

00:28:59.000 Which coincides with the percentage of Americans not expressing belief in God as well.

00:29:03.000 And again, this leaves out the fact that a huge people who say that they are part of religion aren't actually adherents to the specific tenets of the religion.

00:29:09.000 I mean, Joe Biden says that he's a religious Catholic, and then again promotes a bunch of policy that is directly against the doctrine of the Catholic Church.

00:29:15.000 Same thing for Nancy Pelosi. 1.00

00:29:18.000 A Survey Center on American Life report detailed in March 2020 found that younger generations are less likely to adhere to a religion.

00:29:24.000 Over one-third of Generation Z, 34%, consider themselves unaffiliated from religious groups.

00:29:29.000 That figure decreases to 29% among Millennials, 25% among Generation X, 18% among baby boomers, and 9% of the silent generation.

00:29:36.000 There's been a precipitous drop in church membership over the past three decades among those on the political left.

00:29:41.000 In 1998, a majority of liberals, 57%, were members of a church or other type of religious organization.

00:29:46.000 Now, 35% of liberals say that they are members of church or another religious organization.

00:29:52.000 So, when you have Joe Biden sitting there and talking about the unifying traditions of the United States in front of a bunch of Christmas trees, what he does not mean is actual traditional religion, which was the glue that bound together the social fabric of the United States.

00:30:05.000 De Tocqueville talks about this.

00:30:07.000 He talks about how religious adherence among common people who gather together in churches and communities was the glue that held together the United States in the absence of an overarching central government.

00:30:15.000 When you lose that glue, then there has to be some sort of ersatz glue that is used.

00:30:20.000 And that stapler tends to come in the form of government.

00:30:20.000 A stapler is used.

00:30:24.000 And Joe Biden knows this.

00:30:26.000 This is not just happening in the United States, by the way.

00:30:27.000 This is happening all around the world.

00:30:29.000 The secular trends that have taken over the West are going to eat the West.

00:30:31.000 They're going to destroy the West. 0.83

00:30:32.000 They're going to destroy all of the rights that people have traditionally enjoyed in the United States.

00:30:35.000 Because the thing is that what upholds the rights of people is, in fact, the fundamental institutions that undergird those rights.

00:30:42.000 Rights don't just come tabula rasa from nowhere.

00:30:44.000 Rights do not pre-exist institutions. 0.76

00:30:46.000 They coincide with institutions.

00:30:49.000 If you read Lockean philosophy, here's where John Locke was wrong.

00:30:51.000 He suggested If you read him in a particular way.

00:30:55.000 That rights are inherent and institutions are sort of artificial.

00:30:58.000 That is not correct.

00:31:00.000 Institutions pre-exist rights.

00:31:02.000 Families, the chief institution, pre-exist rights. 0.97

00:31:04.000 Rights were created in order to protect families.

00:31:08.000 In order to protect spheres of freedom within the roles and institutions that already existed.

00:31:13.000 When rights start to destroy the institutions, the rights themselves are going to fall apart.

00:31:16.000 And that's exactly what's happened in, for example, the UK.

00:31:20.000 In the UK, the institutions of church, of religion, these have become taboo.

00:31:24.000 It's also happening in Canada.

00:31:25.000 For example, it's happened all over Europe, and at least Western Europe.

00:31:29.000 Eastern Europe is still very religious.

00:31:30.000 And when you look to what's happening in Britain, you'll notice that one of the first things to go, along with freedom of religion, is freedom of speech.

00:31:36.000 There's an amazing story out of the UK yesterday in which a pro-life activist Was arrested for literally standing outside an abortion clinic.

00:31:45.000 Now, she wasn't harassing anybody.

00:31:47.000 She wasn't saying anything.

00:31:48.000 She wasn't holding a sign.

00:31:49.000 She was a person standing there.

00:31:51.000 But you are not allowed to stand there.

00:31:54.000 There's tape that actually emerged of this incident in Britain.

00:31:58.000 It's pretty incredible.

00:32:01.000 Before I ask you any questions about what's going on today, I have to caution you, which is just your rights, which is you do not have to say anything.

00:32:07.000 It may harm your defence if you do not mention one question or something that you later are in court, anything you do say may be given away.

00:32:14.000 What are you here for today?

00:32:16.000 Physically, I'm just standing here.

00:32:18.000 Okay.

00:32:18.000 Why here of all places?

00:32:19.000 I know you don't live nearby.

00:32:21.000 This is an abortion centre.

00:32:23.000 That's why you're standing here.

00:32:23.000 Okay.

00:32:25.000 Is you standing here part of the protest?

00:32:28.000 I'm not protesting.

00:32:28.000 No.

00:32:29.000 Are you praying?

00:32:30.000 I might be praying in my head.

00:32:33.000 So I'll ask you once more, will you voluntarily come with us now to the police station for me to ask you some questions about today and other days where there are allegations that you've broken the Public Spaces Protection Order?

00:32:46.000 If I've got a choice, then no.

00:32:48.000 Okay, well then you're under arrest on suspicion of failing to comply with the Public Spaces Protection Order.

00:32:54.000 Okay, so the Public Spaces Protection Order says that you are not allowed to stand outside an abortion clinic not doing anything.

00:33:00.000 Any other place in the UK you can apparently just stand there.

00:33:03.000 They could have arrested her for loitering or trespassing.

00:33:04.000 They don't.

00:33:05.000 They're arresting her because she is silently praying.

00:33:08.000 In her head.

00:33:09.000 Without moving her face.

00:33:13.000 You think that rights matter in the UK?

00:33:14.000 They do not.

00:33:14.000 We're not even talking about freedom of religion.

00:33:16.000 That'd be like freedom of speech.

00:33:17.000 How about like freedom of standing there?

00:33:20.000 According to Fox News, Isabel Von Spruce, director of the UK March for Life, was standing near the BPAS Robert Clinic in Kings Norton, Birmingham, in an area ADF UK called a censorship zone.

00:33:31.000 When police approached her after an onlooker complained she might be praying outside the abortion facility.

00:33:34.000 God forbid.

00:33:35.000 That would just be terrible.

00:33:37.000 If somebody were to pray, I mean, that's terrible.

00:33:39.000 Birmingham's authorities established a buffer zone around abortion clinics, which makes it illegal for an individual to engage in any act or attempted act of approval or disapproval as it relates to abortion and includes verbal or written means like praying or counseling.

00:33:52.000 So it is now approval or disapproval to stand there.

00:33:55.000 To literally stand there.

00:33:57.000 Vaughn Spruce says, I was exercising my freedom of thought, my freedom of religion inside the privacy of my own mind.

00:34:02.000 Nobody should be criminalized for thinking and for praying in a public space in the UK.

00:34:06.000 She says this is something I've pretty much done every week for around the last 20 years of my life.

00:34:09.000 I pray for my friends who've experienced abortion and for the women who are thinking about going through with it themselves.

00:34:14.000 Von Spruce has stood near the abortion facility while it was closed three times and said she might have been praying.

00:34:19.000 According to the ADF UK, police showed her photos of herself standing outside the facility and asked if she was praying, which she said she could not answer since she spent some time praying but got distracted at other times.

00:34:28.000 Not praying the whole time.

00:34:31.000 I mean, this sort of stuff, again, if you believe that the social fabric of the United States is going to withstand the secular encroachments that essentially argue against the rights of religion and speech, so long as they violate the tenets and belief system of the left, this is what you end up with in the UK.

00:34:50.000 And so what you're seeing in the United States is increasingly a big sort, an ideological sort happening.

00:34:56.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

00:34:57.000 First, in case you missed it, my book club, Ben Shapiro's book club, returned last night for a brand new episode that is available to watch now exclusively on Daily Wire+.

00:35:05.000 We went through The Screwtape Letters by C.S.

00:35:07.000 It's a phenomenal book.

00:35:07.000 Lewis.

00:35:08.000 It's really moving.

00:35:09.000 It has a lot to say about the human condition, about God.

00:35:11.000 You must be an all-access member to watch.

00:35:13.000 Trust me when I say you don't want to miss it.

00:35:15.000 So head on over to dailywire.com slash Ben.

00:35:16.000 Become a member today.

00:35:17.000 Watch the latest episode of my book club.

00:35:19.000 That's dailywire.com slash Ben today.

00:35:22.000 Okay, so the decline of religion in the United States is actually causing a greater rift in the United States.

00:35:28.000 The promise was that as religion declined in the United States, that secularism would take over.

00:35:31.000 There would be sort of a vast blob and we would all be part of that vast blob together in which we got together under the auspices of government.

00:35:38.000 Instead, what's happening is that people are fleeing, fleeing the more secularized states and they are moving to more religious states.

00:35:44.000 Now, it also happens to be that a lot of those more religious states have broader economic protections, broader economic freedoms.

00:35:50.000 This is one of the things that I think the left refuses to understand, is again, rights, particularly property rights, are very much connected to viable institutions that instill social trust.

00:36:00.000 When you have a religious community, people are very respectful of other people's property rights, specifically because they know that their neighbor is not trying to screw them.

00:36:06.000 One of the things that Adam Smith talks about in his first major work, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, is the idea that you have to have viable social institutions, that people are motivated by sympathy, and this creates trust, and that when that trust exists, you can have free markets.

00:36:22.000 Well, when you have societies in which that doesn't exist, you end up with Sam Bankman Freitas, we'll get to in just one moment.

00:36:27.000 But what you are seeing in the United States is a major shift in population.

00:36:30.000 According to Pluribus News, the United States added more than 1.2 million residents over the course of the past year as population growth rebounded from pandemic-era lows.

00:36:38.000 That is an increase attributed almost entirely to international migrants coming to the country.

00:36:42.000 So that is partially our open border.

00:36:44.000 But the more important part of this study, aside from the fact that we aren't having kids and we're importing population, the more important part of the study is where exactly population is being gained.

00:36:53.000 Population growth is not even across the states.

00:36:55.000 Almost all of the top 10 states that added the most residents were in the South.

00:36:58.000 Texas added 470,000 new residents.

00:37:00.000 Florida added 416,000 people.

00:37:03.000 North Carolina and Georgia both added more than 100,000 residents.

00:37:05.000 Arizona added 94,000.

00:37:06.000 South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, Utah, Idaho all added tens of thousands of new residents.

00:37:13.000 The populations of Florida, Idaho, South Carolina, Texas, South Dakota, and Montana all grew by more than 1.5%.

00:37:18.000 You'll notice that in that list, the only blue state is Washington.

00:37:21.000 That is the only blue state.

00:37:23.000 And it is important to mention that in Washington, eastern Washington is very heavily red.

00:37:28.000 Rust Belt states continued a long trend of population declines.

00:37:31.000 New York's population fell by 180,000.

00:37:32.000 Illinois shed more than 100,000 people.

00:37:35.000 Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Ohio all lost population as well.

00:37:39.000 California has seen its population drop in recent years too.

00:37:42.000 The nation's largest state declined by 113,000 people last year.

00:37:46.000 The number of people who moved out of California outpaced the number who moved in by a whopping 343,000 residents, according to the Census Bureau data.

00:37:54.000 Nearly 300,000 New Yorkers moved out of the state over the last year alone.

00:37:57.000 So when we're talking about, you know, how many people overall left, some people moved in, but way more people moved out.

00:38:06.000 Texas has now joined California as the only two states with populations north of 30 million.

00:38:10.000 Florida, which only recently passed New York to become the nation's third most populous state, has more than 2.5 million more residents than the Empire State.

00:38:16.000 So, it is not a shock.

00:38:18.000 All of these states in the South are becoming more red as they become more populous.

00:38:22.000 Meanwhile, all of the states in the Northeast, in the Rust Belt, California, they are becoming blue as they become less populous.

00:38:28.000 Makes perfect sense.

00:38:29.000 A giant ideological sort is happening right now.

00:38:32.000 And the states that are going to grow the fastest are the ones that provide for economic freedom.

00:38:35.000 The states that are going to grow the fastest also happens to be those also happen to be the states with the highest levels of religious adherence.

00:38:41.000 This is not a coincidence.

00:38:42.000 The left wishes you to believe that freedom is dependent on freedom from godliness, freedom from religion, freedom from community, freedom from institutions.

00:38:50.000 The only freedom that is dependent on that is sexual libertinism.

00:38:54.000 All the other freedoms are actually very much dependent on viable social institutions that hold together a society built on trust.

00:39:02.000 And when those institutions disappear, what you end up with is a less trusting America.

00:39:07.000 Now, the great irony of what's happening economically speaking right now in terms of, say, Sam Bankman Freed, is that the entire basis of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency was supposed to be a trustless system.

00:39:18.000 The idea was you don't need social institutions in order to trust the trustless system because, obviously, cryptocurrencies are reliant on the blockchain.

00:39:25.000 The blockchain is all about verifiability and being able to track money through various mechanisms and being able to verify that certain transactions have taken place and that the money that is in your specific wallet is yours and all the rest.

00:39:36.000 But people have a tendency always to rely on trust, even when they should not.

00:39:39.000 And that's how Sam Bankman Freed took advantage of the situation.

00:39:43.000 Yesterday, he was released on $250 million bond with restrictions.

00:39:46.000 Now, was he really released on $250 million bond?

00:39:49.000 The answer is no.

00:39:50.000 Nobody put up $250 million in collateral so Sam Bankman Freed could walk around free.

00:39:53.000 That's not exactly what happened here.

00:39:55.000 Basically, the government pretended that they had set the bond that high in order so they could say that we're taking this super seriously.

00:40:00.000 In reality, his parents basically put up his house, their house, as collateral.

00:40:04.000 But the likelihood is that Bankman Freed is going to spend an awful long time in prison.

00:40:09.000 His release also followed an announcement by Damian Williams, the U.S.

00:40:12.000 Attorney for Southern District of New York, on Wednesday night that two former executives of Bankman Freed's businesses, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, had pled guilty to federal fraud charges and were cooperating with prosecutors.

00:40:22.000 Those charges against the executives are likely to further complicate Bankman Freed's defense.

00:40:26.000 The criminal investigation into FTX and its related entities have moved with startling speed.

00:40:30.000 In under two months, FTX went from a flourishing exchange to a bankrupt entity whose executives are facing criminal charges for some of the financial world's most serious violations.

00:40:37.000 Prosecutors have said that Bankman Freed's crimes led to the implosion of his exchange in billions in customer losses.

00:40:43.000 So, again, this is what happens.

00:40:46.000 Even a trustless system, it turns out, people tend to want to trust people.

00:40:49.000 They do want to trust people.

00:40:50.000 And when you have a system In the United States, more broadly speaking in the West, that undermines fundamental basis of trust because we don't have the same values anymore.

00:40:57.000 And what is supposed to replace it is kind of niceness and civility, as opposed to common standards of behavior and common goals.

00:41:05.000 What you end up with is an Airsat social fabric that is about as comfortable as nylon.

00:41:12.000 It is not going to wear well.

00:41:13.000 And that's what's happening in the United States writ large in terms of our civil society.

00:41:17.000 So people are forming new civil societies, but they're doing so on the state level.

00:41:21.000 Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.

00:41:23.000 You're not going to want to miss it.

00:41:24.000 We'll be getting into the January 6th committee report, but more importantly, we'll be having on Dr. Robert Malone, famous for having been essentially censored by all of media for his questions about vaccination.

The Ben Shapiro Show - December 23, 2022

The Last Republican Sellout of 2022 | Ep. 1637

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