As Vladimir Putin reportedly takes a major Ukrainian city, the West runs out of tools to fight him, and the Biden administration continues working with Russia to help out Iran, it s a good time to invest in gold and silver. Today's show is sponsored by Express VPN. Protect your data at ExpressVPN.co/ProtectYourData. Ben Shapiro's latest book, "The Dark Side of Truth" is out now and it's available for pre-order wherever books are sold. It's also available for rental on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. You can get a free copy of the book for just $19.99. If you don't have a Kindle device, you can get 10% off for a year with the Amazon Prime membership trial when you buy a Kindle Fire, Fire tablet, or other Fire device. You'll get access to all the latest ebooks, audiobooks, and video games, including the newest season of Netflix's Fire Emblem: Three Houses, coming soon. You won't want to miss this! Links From This Episode: Free Training From Amazon Prime All Previous Podcast Episodes Leave Us a Review On Apple Podcasts Subscribe To Our Podcasts And Subscribe On iTunes Learn more about our Sponsorships and Subscribe On Audible Connect with a Friend! Subscribe On All Of Our Social Media Platforms We'll Be Getting Exclusive Discounts & Discounts From Prime Video, Too Early To Watch Our New Episodes Of Our New Shows On Prime Video And Places Like This Learn More About Us Will Be Launching Soon Subscribe on All Previous Subscriber Options & Support Us On All Other Podcasts & Links Get Exclusive Discounted Products From Prime Shirts & Shirts Join Our VIP Discounts? Subscribe & Subscribe To Watch Third-Party Partnerships Become a Friend Of Our Podcast? Share Us On Social Media Partnerships And Support Our Instagrasm Connected To Our Insta-Friendship Watch Us On The Same Podcast Shoutout On Social Platforms Subscribe And Share Our Story Rate & Share This Podcasts Will Be Receipts & Text Meeple Will Be In Airdrover Will Be Released Soon And Other Places To Hear About This Will We Will Be Getting A Free Training And Support Themeple Get A Free Offer On The Podcast Is Also Be In The Podcast Will Be Entered Into An Official Third Party Will Be Started Soon?
00:01:23.000Get a free information kit on buying gold or silver in a tax sheltered account.
00:01:27.000There's no obligation to get this info.
00:01:29.000Text BEN to 989898 to get your free information kit right now.
00:01:34.000All right, so the latest in the Russia-Ukraine saga is that Russian forces are now pounding Kharkiv, which is Ukraine's second largest city, with airstrikes in a bid to break the will of the country's resistance, as Moscow's offensive toward Kiev stalled amid fierce Ukrainian counterattacks and logistics mishaps, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:01:49.000So the Russians have now shifted their tactics.
00:01:51.000Over the past couple of days, they're going to use sheer, brute, overwhelming force in order to just destroy the Ukrainian resistance.
00:01:57.000The basic idea here is that they don't care about civilian casualties.
00:02:01.000They don't really even care about the casualties.
00:02:03.000With regard to their own soldiers, the Russians are sort of famous for taking extraordinary numbers of casualties in war.
00:02:09.000And to get this straight, over the course of the entire Afghanistan war, the United States lost approximately 3,000 American service people in Afghanistan.
00:02:17.000According to Ukrainian sources, the Russians have already lost 6,000 people inside of a week.
00:02:22.000Now, even if that is exaggerated by a factor of 10, even if it's only 600 people, the fact is that that's happened inside of one week.
00:02:29.000The West hasn't really seen a war like this for a very long time, and I think that's why people are going to be shocked by a lot of the images coming out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
00:02:37.000The reason is because in the conflicts that we've seen in the past, basically it's been the United States, which is the world's most sophisticated military power, by a factor of 10.
00:02:44.000The United States spends more money on its military budget than the rest of the world combined.
00:02:48.000And our military hardware and our military infrastructure is super sophisticated.
00:02:53.000So when we fire a missile, we know exactly where it is going.
00:03:00.000When you see the United States go to war and we miss, we miss very, very narrow.
00:03:05.000And when we hit and we hit somebody innocent, it's because we made a mistake in the intel, not because we hit something we didn't mean to hit.
00:03:11.000The United States is extraordinarily precise in its battle plans.
00:03:14.000And so when you see the war in Afghanistan, you see an extraordinarily sophisticated military power going to war with barbarians.
00:03:19.000And so that means that the casualties on both sides tend to be low because the United States uses really, really precise weaponry in order to do what it wants to do.
00:03:29.000Other conflicts that we've watched in the course of the Western world over the course of the last 20, 30 years, Israel versus the Palestinians, for example.
00:03:35.000Israel has a very, very sophisticated military.
00:03:38.000Its infrastructure is very sophisticated.
00:04:37.000And this has been part of Russia's playbook for quite a while.
00:04:39.000They've been using this since Chechnya in the late 1990s.
00:04:43.000If you cannot pacify a region, you just start killing as many civilians as you can.
00:04:47.000Or at the very least, you try to shock and awe people into surrendering by killing civilians and demonstrating that you are harder than they are.
00:04:53.000You do not care how many civilians you have to kill and you really don't care how many soldiers you lose in the course of the battle.
00:04:58.000And so the numbers that we've seen out of Ukraine, if you compare them to World War II, they're nothing.
00:05:03.000If you compare them to a normal American war, they're extraordinary.
00:05:07.000For the United States, we pulled out of Afghanistan after a year in which we lost zero soldiers in combat because Joe Biden suggested that there were going to be too many American soldiers killed.
00:05:16.000Russia just lost at a very minimum, as according to the Russians, they lost about 600 troops in the last week alone.
00:05:22.000And according to the Ukrainians, it's 10 times that number.
00:05:36.000And so part of their playbook is if they start to lose, like really lose, they could They've not ruled out first use of tactical nuclear weapons.
00:05:43.000That doesn't mean they're going to fire a nuke into the center of Krakow or something.
00:05:47.000It does mean that they would consider, if they were really going to lose a battle, deploying a battlefield tactical nuclear weapon, the first use of nuclear weapons since World War II.
00:05:56.000And nobody wants that because then that does require some sort of world response.
00:06:00.000And would the world respond to a tactical nuclear weapon being used on a battlefield in Ukraine, which is in the heart of Europe?
00:06:06.000How could they, without actually driving a larger Russian nuclear response?
00:06:14.000The world's in a very precarious situation, and all the economic warfare that has been waged against Russia, which is morally justifiable, and geostrategically justifiable, there's got to be an off-ramp here.
00:06:24.000Because if there's not an off-ramp here, the best-case scenario is a guerrilla war that lasts 10 to 20 years in the heart of the continent.
00:06:30.000Russia is bombing the hell out of Kharkiv.
00:07:47.000So according to the Wall Street Journal, Russian missile debris fell near Kiev's central train station on Wednesday night, damaging a major heating pipeline with a blast wave breaking the station's windows.
00:07:55.000Thousands of civilians, particularly women and children, are sheltering in the station at night as they await evacuation trains to western Ukraine.
00:08:01.000Ukrainian officials said the missile was shot down by Kiev's air defenses.
00:08:05.000In the southern part of the country, Russian forces are really making progress.
00:08:34.000Kharkiv residents, said the city of 1.4 million, suffered heavy bombardment for the third day in a row, including airstrikes that hit residential areas and civilian infrastructure.
00:08:42.000Kharkiv's municipal and police headquarters, as well as the nearby university building, were severely damaged and caught fire.
00:08:47.000Local authorities reported 21 dead, 112 injured in the past 24 hours alone.
00:08:51.000Moscow says it is not targeting civilians, but obviously they are hitting civilian buildings with a fair bit of regularity.
00:08:57.000Russian forces also attempted to seize the city's military hospital, according to local authorities.
00:09:01.000The front line held the city, located 30 miles from the Russian border, remained under firm Ukrainian control.
00:09:05.000According to Kharkiv's deputy governor Roman Semenuka, he said, we have understood their tactic. They can't enter the city.
00:09:11.000Every time they try, we hit them in the teeth. So instead they're trying to sow panic with missile strikes hitting critical infrastructure and residential areas, trying to demoralize us. Kiev was hit by several strikes on Wednesday night.
00:09:20.000In fact, there was film that was coming out from CBS News of its reporters.
00:09:24.000And behind them, you can see giant explosions in the background.
00:09:28.000Ukrainian defenses are still holding on in all the major urban areas under attack, with the exception of that Russian advance north of Crimea, which of course was a Russian base of operations.
00:09:37.000If you look at the map, what you're starting to see is that that Russian red move up the map and you're starting to see Russian red move a little bit down the map.
00:09:43.000They're having a much tougher time in the north than they are in the south because Crimea, of course, had already been essentially run by Russia since 2014.
00:09:50.000There's also talk, by the way, that the Russians may swivel to the west and try to take Moldova.
00:09:55.000Moldova is another sort of border country with Ukraine.
00:09:58.000It's located between Romania and Ukraine.
00:10:01.000So any country that is not part of NATO is now living on borrowed time if they are watching what Vladimir Putin is doing right here.
00:10:08.000So Kherson was the first major city to fall here.
00:10:12.000And again, you can see that the Russian invasion is having some pretty significant success in eastern Ukraine as well as in southern Ukraine.
00:10:20.000Meanwhile, European officials said they expected Moldova and Georgia to follow Ukraine in applying for membership in the European Union.
00:10:27.000Expanding the EU eastwards, according to Matina Steves-Gridnev reporting from Brussels for the New York Times, expanding the EU eastwards has traditionally been a divisive topic among older member states.
00:10:37.000The bloc should grow in that direction despite the Russian invasion.
00:10:40.000The reason is because the West is very nervous that if they simply say that these places can enter the EU without actually stationing significant military resources there, then Russia could theoretically break NATO just by walking into these states because these states do not actually have enough defenses against Russian predation.
00:10:55.000So Russians could walk in and then they could claim victory and then they could claim that they broke NATO because NATO didn't actually defend the territory because they didn't have the wherewithal, the power, the people on the ground to defend the territory at this point.
00:11:07.000Meanwhile, Germany has said that it's going to keep rearming.
00:11:11.000NATO is just going to be rearming from abroad.
00:11:12.000Germany is going to send 2,700 shoulder-launched surface-to-air rockets to Ukraine in addition to arms shipments the country has already announced.
00:11:19.000The Soviet-made Strela rockets were in East Germany's arsenal when Germany reunited more than three decades ago.
00:11:24.000So ironically, you now have Soviet-made arsenals being sent to Ukraine to fight off the Russians.
00:11:29.000Germany said last weekend it would send more modern, shoulder-launched anti-tank rockets and surface-to-air Stinger missiles to Ukraine after decades of reluctance to send weapons into conflict zones.
00:11:39.000Now, all of this is accompanied by some very weird sort of PR moves, and I don't understand them.
00:11:43.000So, for example, a university in Milan, in Italy, has decided to no longer teach Dostoevsky?
00:12:02.000There's been also an attempt to bar Russian movies from film festivals.
00:12:06.000I'm not sure if those Russian creators are somehow complicit in the invasion.
00:12:10.000There's been an attempt to Take Russian assets without proper evidence that those Russian assets are linked to the attack on Ukraine.
00:12:20.000There's been an attempt to bar Russian athletes from participating in meets.
00:12:26.000I don't know why those people should pay for the sins of Vladimir Putin, and I don't think it's going to convince Vladimir Putin to stop doing what he is doing.
00:12:34.000That seems foolhardy almost all the way across the board.
00:12:37.000With that said, The problem here is that the West is running out of tools.
00:12:40.000So again, the newest tool that the West is using is to try and resupply.
00:12:45.000According to the New York Times, the Dutch are sending rocket launchers for air defense.
00:12:48.000The Estonians are sending Javelin anti-tank missiles.
00:12:50.000The Poles and Latvians are sending Stinger surface-to-air missiles.
00:12:53.000The Czechs are sending machine guns, sniper rifles, pistols, and ammo.
00:12:56.000Even formerly neutral countries like Sweden and Finland are sending weapons.
00:12:59.000Germany, long allergic to sending weapons into conflict zones, is sending Stingers as well as other shoulder-launched rockets, according to the New York Times, in all about 20 countries.
00:13:07.000Most members of NATO and the EU, but not all, are funneling arms into Ukraine to fight off Russian invaders in armed insurgency if the war comes to that.
00:13:14.000At the same time, NATO is moving military equipment and as many as 22,000 more troops into member states bordering Russia and Belarus to reassure them and enhance deterrence.
00:13:24.000According to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU, she said European security and defense has evolved more in the last six days than in the last two decades.
00:13:31.000Brussels has moved to Europeanize the efforts of member states to aid Ukraine with weapons and money, put down a marker for the bloc as a significant military actor.
00:13:38.000But whether European weaponry will continue to reach the Ukrainian battlefield in time to make a difference is far from certain.
00:13:44.000It's a strategy that risks encouraging a wider war, possible retaliation from Putin.
00:13:48.000Putin already sees NATO as committed to threaten or even destroy Russia through its support for Ukraine.
00:13:52.000That is what he has said over and over and over again.
00:13:54.000And this is the excuse that Putin has used all along, is that these evil Westerners, they keep provoking me by allowing Ukraine to move toward the West.
00:14:04.000One of the people who's been promoting that idea is John Mearsheimer, most famous for his idiotic book with Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S.
00:14:09.000Foreign Policy, in which he suggested that essentially the Jews control American foreign policy.
00:14:13.000So Mearsheimer also has similarly idiotic ideas with regard to Russia and Ukraine.
00:14:18.000He did an interview with The New Yorker trying to say that the West is at fault for Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
00:14:24.000He said, I think all the trouble in this case really started in April 2008 at the NATO summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO.
00:14:32.000The Russians made it unequivocally clear at that time.
00:14:34.000They viewed this as an existential threat.
00:14:38.000Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia's border.
00:14:44.000Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion.
00:14:46.000NATO expansion is at the heart of the strategy, but it includes EU expansion as well.
00:14:49.000It includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.
00:14:52.000And from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.
00:14:54.000So he doesn't explain why that's an existential threat.
00:14:57.000Why is Ukraine being a liberal democracy an existential threat to Russia?
00:15:00.000There has not been a single attack launched, as far as I'm aware, across the Russian border by Ukraine.
00:15:05.000This is not like Lebanon attacking Israel or something.
00:15:08.000Ukraine has not been used as a staging ground to attack Russia.
00:15:45.000I mean, Ukraine became a pro-America liberal democracy of its own accord.
00:15:50.000They've had democratic elections multiple times, and they've shifted.
00:15:53.000Sometimes they're more pro-America, sometimes they're less pro-America.
00:15:57.000If a country decides of its own accord that it wishes to ally itself with Western democratic values, why should Russia see that as an existential threat?
00:16:07.000We're not trying to overthrow the Russian regime, and we've made no attempts to do so.
00:16:11.000More on John Mearsheimer's take that the United States is responsible for Ukraine being invaded by Russia, which is a self-defeating and illogical take.
00:16:23.000By law, in many states, you need home insurance.
00:16:25.000And finding home insurance, most people do it by word of mouth, which is not an efficient way to do this thing, because then you're only competing with nobody.
00:16:31.000Basically, your friend tells you to get home insurance from X company.
00:16:34.000You've never checked out other prices.
00:17:26.000Mearsheimer says, this is not imperialism, this is great power politics.
00:17:30.000When you're a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they're going to retaliate.
00:17:38.000States in the Western Hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States.
00:17:43.000Yes, but that assumes that the Ukrainians didn't of their own accord attempt to join the pro-America bloc in the EU.
00:17:48.000It assumes that really it was just the United States that had been promoting this.
00:17:52.000That we had overthrown the popular sentiment in Ukraine and wanted to join Russia.
00:17:57.000But as the war is currently proving, Ukrainians do not want to join Russia.
00:18:05.000That does not mean that we quote-unquote provoked it.
00:18:08.000What it means is that Russia pursuing its own interests is in direct opposition to the interests of the people of Ukraine.
00:18:13.000If you wish to take all of the morality out of the situation, yes, Russia is making a power move, and then the West is making a power move back.
00:18:19.000But that does not mean a moral equivalence between the West and Russia, which is a gas-powered thugocracy.
00:18:26.000Mearsheimer says, when you try to create a world that looks like that, you end up with the disastrous policies the United States pursued during the unipolar moment.
00:18:32.000We went around the world trying to create liberal democracies.
00:18:34.000Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East.
00:19:51.000Steadfastly ignoring predations by the Chinese in Hong Kong and ignoring predations by the Russians in Georgia and Crimea.
00:19:59.000If we had not done that, perhaps Vladimir Putin wouldn't have been convinced, as he apparently was, that the world was a paper tiger and would do nothing in the face of a Russian advance.
00:20:07.000Now that he has gone in, the tools radically shrink.
00:20:09.000Because what can you do to him that you haven't already done?
00:20:14.000We've levied these major economic sanctions.
00:20:17.000We have rearmed the opposition in Ukraine the best that we can.
00:20:21.000And so, the West's options are shrinking and shrinking fast, as the Wall Street Journal points out today.
00:20:26.000They say seven days into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the U.S.
00:20:29.000and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies are coming under increasing pressure to do more to help Ukraine, even as they face diminishing options for doing so.
00:20:36.000As Russia continues to push to capture urban areas, one of the more drastic options discussed publicly has been a no-fly zone that would stop Russian aircraft from launching strikes over Ukraine.
00:20:44.000The idea has been dismissed by the United States and NATO countries.
00:20:47.000The reason being, we don't want to be in a direct conflict with the Russians.
00:20:52.000I mean, we'd shoot down all of their jets in a matter of moments.
00:20:55.000We have a much more sophisticated military.
00:20:57.000I mean, the Ukrainians are shooting down Russian jets right now, and they have Soviet-era weaponry.
00:21:02.000If NATO got directly involved in this conflict, and there were no fears of broader conflict or tactical nuclear warheads, this conflict would be over already.
00:21:10.000Russia does not have anything like the military power in the conventional sense necessary to stop NATO or the United States, for example.
00:21:26.000And that's what Putin was saying, right?
00:21:27.000When Putin raised the nuclear alert, what he's saying is, do not do a no-fly zone because if you do, you're just going to push me further and you've already seen how far I'm willing to go.
00:21:35.000Creating a continuous effective no-fly zone over Ukraine, particularly with several NATO nations, would require several hundred planes not only to uphold the no-fly zone, but to support those aircraft maintaining that no-fly zone.
00:21:45.000In addition, air force across multiple nations would have to coordinate, and should Russia attack NATO member aircraft, that would be seen as an attack on the 30-member alliance, and at that point you do have a world war.
00:21:54.000The British government has said it would instead continue to impose more sanctions.
00:21:57.000Sanctions, however, are not having an immediate impact on the battlefield, as Western leaders have acknowledged.
00:22:02.000Officials hope that the unprecedented economic hit will bite the Russian economy rapidly, meaning that as the bombs fall on Kiev, there will be Russian bank runs and Russian businesses collapsing, showing real-world consequences for Putin.
00:22:14.000But that's going to mean... Basically, there are only a few scenarios here left on the table.
00:22:18.000Scenario number one is that the Russian oligarchs take a look at Putin.
00:22:22.000They say, you're destroying our livelihoods, you've destroyed our holdings, you're getting Russian soldiers killed, you need to go.
00:22:28.000And the Russian military turns on Putin and they oust him.
00:22:38.000Then there is situation number two, and that is a large-scale guerrilla war that carries on the continent for 10 to 20 years, according to intelligence sources, in which Russia uses the overwhelming bulk of its force to take Ukraine, installs a puppet dictator, and then the Ukrainian people just resist for the next couple of decades with help from the West.
00:22:54.000Very, very ugly canker growing in the middle.
00:22:57.000of Europe, with extraordinary repercussions for the border states around Ukraine already.
00:23:02.000A million refugees have been swamping the border.
00:23:05.000Hundreds of thousands of them have been moving into Poland.
00:23:07.000Whenever you have a major international crisis like this, whether it is in Libya or whether it is in Ukraine, and Ukraine's a lot closer than Libya, you end up with a situation with huge refugee issues and massive overflow into the West, which creates significant domestic problems for Western European countries at the very, very least.
00:23:24.000Plus an emboldened Russian state, which has taken it and really has no reason not to try and break the NATO alliance even further.
00:23:30.000So what exactly does Vladimir Putin have to lose at this point?
00:23:32.000We have now hit him with the largest economic sanctions probably in world history.
00:23:37.000We have him isolated on an international level from everybody except for maybe India, China.
00:23:50.000First, let's talk about the simple fact that when you eat something good, the first thing you think is, this is gonna cost me a lot of calories, right?
00:23:55.000I mean, if it tastes good, it's probably gonna make me fat.
00:23:59.000I know, it sounds impossible, but Tessa Mays has found a way to make that magic happen for you with their award-winning ranch dressings and vinaigrettes.
00:24:06.000Tessa Mays is an American-made company started by three brothers with a dream to share their mom's recipes with the world.
00:24:12.000Tessa Mays puts flavor and quality above all else because of that.
00:24:15.000They quickly became the number one organic dressing brand in the country.
00:24:18.000All of their products are manufactured here in the U.S.
00:24:20.000They have a wide variety of kosher products like their avocado ranch and lemon garlic dressing and marinade.
00:24:25.000We've been enjoying that at the Shapiro household, let me tell you.
00:24:27.000Kids, parents, grandparents, they can all agree on one thing.
00:24:29.000Tessa Mays dressings are great on everything, whether you are dipping wings, Or you're pouring it on pizza or putting it on a salad.
00:25:55.000I mean, yes, we would like to see all the temperatures decreased at this point.
00:26:00.000We'd certainly like to see Moscow reciprocate by taking the temperature down on rhetoric about nuclear posture.
00:26:08.000We certainly would like to see him de-escalate by coming to a ceasefire and de-escalating and moving those forces back home and getting out of Ukraine.
00:26:22.000And the Biden administration, again, the mistakes that the Biden administration made were mistakes that were made before the invasion.
00:26:28.000What the Biden administration has done since the invasion is the correct thing.
00:26:31.000And that's not because they somehow rallied the world or because Joe Biden is a great politician.
00:26:35.000It's because this is what happens in politics.
00:26:38.000A thing happens, everybody reacts to the thing.
00:26:40.000That is what has happened in Eastern Europe right now.
00:26:43.000According to Secretary of State Tony Blinken, the United States is monitoring the shelling of civilians.
00:26:47.000He says that the Russians have really ratcheted things up in the last couple of days.
00:26:52.000We've certainly seen in the past that one of Russia's methods of war is to be absolutely brutal in trying to cow the citizenry of a given country.
00:27:09.000And that includes, at the very least, indiscriminate targeting and potentially deliberate targeting as well.
00:27:19.000We're looking very closely at what's happening in Ukraine right now, including what's happening to civilians.
00:27:36.000The problem is weakness breeds weakness.
00:27:38.000If you didn't stop it before it started, it's very difficult to start it now, which is why Joe Biden, correctly, was saying yesterday that while it's clear that Russia is targeting civilians, he's not sure if it's war crimes yet.
00:27:48.000The reason that Biden is saying that, he knows it's war crimes.
00:27:51.000When I say he's correct, What I mean is that Joe Biden is looking for that off ramp.
00:27:53.000He's desperately looking for Vladimir Putin to take that off ramp, which is what the West has to hope for at this point.
00:27:58.000Because if Putin doesn't, then you're going to end up with scenario number two, which is that large scale, long lasting occupation of a country that does not want to be occupied, dead center of Europe.
00:28:07.000Here is Joe Biden trying to take down the rhetoric.
00:28:24.000Okay, so again, he's admitting that they're doing it, but at the same time, he won't say they're doing it.
00:28:31.000This would be all well and good and sort of the sort of normal way this would proceed, I mean, there's no normal here, but this is sort of the understandable way in which this would proceed, except for the fact that this administration continues to be very, very unserious about Russia with regard to ancillary issues.
00:28:47.000So if you're seeking to dissuade Russia from doing what it is doing, you do need to cut off relations with them.
00:28:52.000You do need to stop attempting to work with them on issues supposedly important to them.
00:28:58.000And you actually do need to call on the American people to make a sacrifice.
00:29:02.000Now Joe Biden said in the State of the Union that you will have to make a sacrifice.
00:29:05.000Then he wouldn't actually detail what the sacrifice was.
00:29:07.000Because here's the problem for Joe Biden.
00:29:10.000In the sense that weakness breeds submission.
00:29:13.000And so Joe Biden's weakness brought about this conflict.
00:29:16.000They pull out from Afghanistan and bolden Putin.
00:29:18.000Several months of us saying that NATO alliances were split and that a minor incursion might not merit any sort of response.
00:29:25.000That all of that encouraged Putin's invasion.
00:29:29.000That means that he has now brought this about.
00:29:33.000And so now he's trying to split the baby because instead of saying, listen, we have to bring the harshest sanctions we possibly can.
00:29:37.000That might mean higher prices at the pump.
00:29:40.000And we are also going to have to tell the left.
00:29:42.000We're going to have to tell people on the progressive left that we are going to put our environmental policies on hold because we need to compete with Russia.
00:29:52.000Instead of Joe Biden saying that to his left.
00:29:54.000And instead of saying to everybody else, and that means that temporarily your gas prices are going to go up, but this is what it means to be the leader of the free world.
00:30:01.000Instead of Joe Biden saying any of that, they just refuse to say any of that.
00:30:04.000So Jen Psaki said yesterday that we are thinking about energy sanctions, but we're still importing 600,000 barrels of Russian oil every day because after all, we have to minimize the price impact on Americans.
00:30:25.000We want to minimize the impact on the global marketplace, and that includes the global oil marketplace and the impact of energy prices for the American people.
00:30:35.000So that's one of the factors that we really look at.
00:30:55.000By the way, Germany is willing to undertake the sacrifice.
00:30:57.000Germany, which until five seconds, I mean, they get like half of their power.
00:31:01.000Literally half of their natural gas comes from Russia and they've cut it off.
00:31:04.000Their prices have gone up 100% over the course of the last week because they understand that sometimes you need to take the hit in order to do the right thing.
00:31:11.000I can't believe I'm saying that about the German government, but that's the reality.
00:31:16.000They won't even tell their left that they are trying to move back toward ramping up oil production because, God forbid, the environmentalists who love Greta Thunberg, and she's so angry at you, she's so upset, they might piss off an 18-year-old Norwegian teen or whatever.
00:31:32.000Here is Biden advisor Cedric Richmond saying yesterday, we still need to pass the climate agenda.
00:31:36.000That's the real solution here is green energy.
00:32:33.000It's just an unserious administration.
00:32:34.000It's an unserious administration flying by the seat of its geriatric pants.
00:32:39.000This guy, man, this administration just continues to crap the bed.
00:32:43.000Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, the greatest of all expositors on both foreign and domestic policy, she was asked about what we are going to do, and she brought out her favorite line.
00:32:51.000We are going to do what we've always done, and it is always that time.
00:32:54.000See, the first time she said this, I thought it was a gaffe.
00:32:56.000The second time, I think she actually thinks she knows what she's talking about.
00:33:02.000So what else do we have to throw at this when Putin so far is undeterred?
00:33:06.000Well, we are going to continue to do what we've done.
00:33:08.000For example, in the sanctions, it's been sanctions against their financial institutions, against their oligarchs, where we are targeting their mansions and their jets.
00:33:17.000What we are going to continue to do is stand firm with our allies in terms of reassessing what we are doing with sanctions.
00:33:24.000Everything is on the table for consideration, frankly.
00:33:29.000We're going to continue doing what we've always done.
00:33:31.000But then Harris was asked, OK, so are we going to cut off their energy supplies?
00:33:35.000Are we going to cut off the energy markets?
00:33:37.000And she refuses to answer the question.
00:33:39.000And then she just speaks mashed potatoes.
00:33:42.000As it relates to what we need to do domestically as well as what we need to do in terms of this issue generally, we have, as the president said, re-evaluated what we're doing in terms of the strategic oil reserve here in the United States to make sure that it will not have an impact or we can mitigate the impact on the American consumer.
00:34:00.000But let's take this one step at a time.
00:34:05.000Okay, so thank you for that gobbledygook, Vice President Harris.
00:34:08.000By the way, the Biden administration, when I say they're unserious, I mean they are deeply unserious when it comes to Russia in many, many ways.
00:34:13.000The most obvious way is that they are still using Russia to broker a deal with the Iranian mullahs, the greatest exporters of terrorism on planet Earth, the Iranian government, which has destabilized regimes ranging from Yemen to Syria to Lebanon.
00:34:29.000Which has sought to start wars with Saudi Arabia, with Israel, funded Hamas.
00:34:34.000This regime, the United States is currently attempting to sign some sort of deal with them that is not going to achieve anything that would remotely look like an American interest, just because Joe Biden has these vanity projects.
00:34:45.000It's amazing how one politician's vanity can really drive America off the road and into a ditch.
00:35:25.000He's got Robert Malley negotiating this thing.
00:35:28.000And Robert Malley, without the consultation of any of our supposed allies, you know, like Saudi Arabia or Israel or the UAE or any of those, he's negotiating a deal with the Iranians, brokered by the Russians, brokered by the Russians.
00:35:39.000The Russians are currently murdering civilians in Ukraine.
00:35:42.000And the United States, on the one hand, is like, we're going to sanction the hell out of them.
00:36:03.000According to Gabriel Naranja, reporting from SASC, he's a former Iran official at the State Department, he says, my former career State Department, NSC, and EU colleagues are so concerned with the concessions being made by Robert Malley in Vienna, they've allowed me to publish some details of the coming deal in the hopes Congress will stop the capitulation.
00:36:22.000One warned what's happening in Vienna is a total disaster.
00:36:25.000The entire negotiations have been filtered and essentially run by Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov.
00:36:30.000The concessions and other misguided policies have led three members of the negotiating team from the United States to leave.
00:36:37.000Niranha says this is a long and technical thread.
00:36:45.000interests in either the short or long term.
00:36:47.000Led by Robert Malley, the United States has promised to lift sanctions on some of the Iranian regime's worst terrorists and torturers, leading officials in the regime's WMD infrastructure, and is currently trying to lift sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard itself.
00:37:02.000Biden seems preparing to rescind the Supreme Leader's Office Executive Order as soon as this coming Monday, and lift sanctions on nearly every one of the 112 people and entities sanctioned under it, even if they are sanctioned by other legal authorities.
00:37:14.000Some of the people who have been sanctioned are people like Mohsen Rezaei, who was involved in the 1994 AMIA bombing that killed 85 people in Argentina, who will be able to live free of sanctions next week if Malley has his way.
00:37:27.000Other people who will be living free of sanctions We'll be people like Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor to the Supreme Leader Khamenei, who was charged in Argentina for homicide for that terrorist attack and also propped up Assad's brutality in Syria.
00:37:41.000According to Naranja, it's important to note the Supreme Leader's office EO was not at all related to Iran's nuclear program.
00:37:47.000The removal of those sanctions under a so-called nuclear deal is a farce.
00:37:50.000The State Department lawyers know better.
00:37:54.000He says also sanctions will be lifted on huge swaths of the regime's economic and financial arms that were supporting the Iranian terror repression and WMD infrastructure.
00:38:14.000The sanctions are not even related to Iran's nuclear program, but we're going to lift sanctions on those anyway.
00:38:20.000So you've got America trying to lift sanctions on Iran, being negotiated by the Russians while we are telling the Russians that they have been banned from the international community, so to speak.
00:38:32.000They also want, by the way, the Iranians haven't even accepted the deal yet.
00:38:37.000All that has to happen for them to accept the deal is that the United States will remove IRCG, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list and sanctions if the Iranians promise to talk about new negotiations.
00:38:51.000Apparently, the Iranians have not accepted that offer yet because they want the unconditional removal of the terror organization designation.
00:39:00.000For all of these concessions, we get nothing from the Iranians.
00:40:01.000Every month, from lower rates to shorter terms, even debt consolidation, their salary-based mortgage consultants can do it all, and they never charge upfront or hidden fees.
00:41:47.000We're going to be streaming the film once on March 10th for all of YouTube to see.
00:41:50.000After that, you need to be a member to get in on the action.
00:41:53.000Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe so you don't miss any more of the growing cache of content we have to offer.
00:42:00.000Plus, My friend Jonathan Isaac, he has a new book out.
00:42:03.000You need to go check it out right now.
00:42:04.000It's no secret that wokeness has infiltrated everything, including sports.
00:42:07.000We're not the only ones who are fed up.
00:42:08.000That's why Orlando Magic star Jonathan Isaac is publishing a book with The Daily Wire about the rise of his basketball career, his journey into faith, his strength to stand alone in the face of immense social pressure.
00:42:36.000You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:42:39.000Well, meanwhile, the U.S. economy is about to hit the skids.
00:42:47.000There are just a number of forces that are militating against the upward trajectory of the United States economy.
00:42:54.000One of those, by the way, is the continuing fostering of relationship between Russia and China.
00:42:58.000China announced just yesterday They would not join in sanctions on Russia that have been led by the West.
00:43:02.000So the Russia, China, Iran axis is growing stronger and stronger.
00:43:06.000The United States is responding to that by moving to confront China on trade and industrial policy.
00:43:11.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration is preparing to confront China on its industrial subsidies and seek ways to protect America's edge in new technologies, hardening U.S.
00:43:19.000economic policy toward the nation's chief global rival.
00:43:23.000We should have been doing this years ago, in fact.
00:43:26.000The interrelationship between the Chinese economy and the American economy, it turns out, has been a boon for China and not quite such a boon for the United States.
00:43:33.000The White House is weighing heightened scrutiny of U.S.
00:43:35.000companies' investments in China, tighter export controls, and sensitive technologies, greater cooperation with European and Asian allies and partners on subsidies and other issues.
00:43:44.000That approach is motivated by growing conviction within the Biden administration that Donald Trump's tariff campaign against Chinese imports did not persuade Beijing to compete fairly in international trade.
00:43:52.000Apparently, they're going to confront Beijing's non-market practices by going to the World Trade Organization, is apparently the idea here.
00:44:00.000The new initiative comes as efforts to build on the Phase One deal have stalled with high-level U.S.
00:44:04.000and Chinese officials no longer in close communications on trade.
00:44:07.000So, we are now breaking... It turns out, again, the age of American hegemony has serious costs.
00:44:12.000The end of that has serious costs for the American public.
00:44:16.000In other words, we now have to do things we didn't have to do before because we got weak on American foreign policy.
00:44:21.000And so the predictable effect of that is that products are going to become a lot more expensive.
00:44:24.000A lot of the interrelated economic relationships that have been created over the course of the last 30 years are about to fragment.
00:44:30.000That may be necessary and it may be good.
00:44:32.000Is if we had never had to do any of that because we had been so strong on foreign policy that everybody was damned afraid of us.
00:44:38.000But obviously that's no longer the case.
00:44:40.000Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell says he's going to propose a quarter percentage point rate increase at the central bank's meeting in two weeks amid high inflation, strong economic demand and a tight labor market.
00:44:50.000He got explicit because he was afraid that the markets were getting very, very shaky.
00:44:53.000There was a lot of prediction that he was going to raise by half a point as opposed to a quarter point.
00:44:57.000The Fed really has only done quarter point raises for the past 15 years or so.
00:45:02.000Powell said on Wednesday before Russia's invasion of Ukraine last week, he expected the central bank would follow that initial rate rise with a series of increases this year.
00:45:09.000Powell said, for now, I would say we'll proceed carefully along the lines of that plan.
00:45:13.000We're going to avoid adding uncertainty to what is already an extraordinarily challenging and uncertain moment.
00:45:34.000Powell effectively ended a debate in markets and among other Fed officials over whether they would lift rates from zero this month with a larger half percentage point increase.
00:45:41.000At the same time, he laid the groundwork for the possibility of half point increases this summer, pushing back against the idea that the more traditional quarter point increases represent a speed limit for the Fed.
00:45:51.000So he's saying just for the moment, we're going to do 0.25, 25 basis points, but a little bit later, maybe three months from now, maybe we'll jump it from 0.25 to 0.75.
00:46:01.000Pell said his colleagues expect inflation to peak and diminish soon.
00:46:04.000He said to the extent inflation comes in higher or is more persistently high than that, we will be prepared to move more aggressively by raising rates by a half percentage point at one or more meetings later this year.
00:46:13.000So all of the foreign policy discombobulation combined with Joe Biden's threats against various businesses Combined with Jerome Powell raising the interest rates is likely to lead to a bit of economic stagnation right here.
00:46:27.000We're not going to see wildly booming economic numbers this year in the way that was once forecast by all of the economic predictors.
00:46:35.000Now the best thing that could happen, honestly, for Joe Biden and for the country is for him to lose Congress in 2022.
00:46:40.000If he loses Congress in November, the markets are going to go back to sleep.
00:46:43.000If he loses in 2022, the markets are going to say, okay, at the very least, we're not going to get massive crackdowns on American business in a way that Joe Biden would prefer because Congress will stop it.
00:46:51.000He'll actually have the power to stop it.
00:46:53.000I think the markets are already starting to price that in, which is why you're seeing the markets somewhat stable in the face of all of this chaos.
00:47:00.000Suffice it to say, however, that the growth numbers that were forecast at the beginning of Joe Biden's administration have not been hit, and that is because of Joe Biden's incompetence on both foreign and domestic policy.
00:47:09.000The best thing that can happen to the markets is Joe Biden failing in his policy goals.
00:47:13.000We've had massive job increases in December, in January, in February.
00:47:17.000Those massive job increases are because Joe Biden didn't get what he wanted.