Joe Biden is off somewhere, wandering in the woods, refusing to answer questions from the media. It was his birthday, and that was an excuse for him not to talk to the media, just like every other day of the year. Well, now it turns out he s still president of the United States, and still doing things, as we ll get to in just a little bit. Plus, a heated debate about who's going to win the 2020 Democratic primary, and why the left is still in denial about the outcome of the 2016 election. And a fight breaks out in the House of Representatives over whether or not Sarah McBride should be allowed to use the women's bathroom in public, even though she says she's a biological woman. And, of course, a man who calls himself Tim McBride says he's a woman, but he calls himself a dude. And that's not even half as bad as the rest of the Democrats on the left are making it out to be about it, is it? And what does that have to do with a woman who thinks she should use the ladies' bathroom? And a guy who thinks his name should be Sarah? Well, you'll just have to wait until the end of this episode to find out. the answer to all that and more! Welcome back to another episode of Thick & Thin, hosted by John Rocha and Matt Knost, where we talk about all things politics, economics, and pop culture, and everything else in between. Enjoy! . . . and don't forget to subscribe to our new podcast, Thick and Thin and Thin. Enjoy. . And don t forget to leave us a rating and review this episode so we can keep us up to date on what's going on in the world of politics and culture and politics. Thank you for listening to Thick and thin! and we can all have a good time in the real world, y'all know that we're not just one of those things, right here, folks. We're all of that's a good one. Thank you, folks! - John R&R. -- we'll see you next week, too, John RYAN MCCART OF COURSE! -- John Sommers -- and we'll be back next Monday, next Tuesday, November 5th, 2020, next Wednesday, November 6th, November 7th, so don't miss it, right?
00:00:18.000Well, now it turns out he's still president of the United States and still doing things, as we'll get to in just a little bit.
00:00:23.000Some of those things may not be wonderful over in Ukraine with regard to Russia, but he's still not talking to the media and still Democrats can't figure out exactly why they lost.
00:03:04.000And that's taken by the left to mean that he's just going to jail his political opponents, that he's going to use all of the aspects of government to go against the people that he hates.
00:03:13.000When he says that Trump is your vengeance, what he means is that the American people has been victimized by a small group of elitists who have decided that their morality is superior to those of Americans and that they ought to be able to rule every area of American life using their pseudo-expertise.
00:03:42.000So, there's a hot fight that is now broken out in the House of Representatives.
00:03:47.000Over a representative who calls himself Sarah McBride.
00:03:50.000I say that because Sarah McBride is a man named Tim McBride and changed his name to Sarah and is now a trans person and insists on using the ladies' bathroom, even though, of course, he's a dude.
00:04:01.000Well, Nancy Mace, who is a female, you know, as in a biological female, she has now sponsored a rule on the House floor that would say, you know, if you're a lady, you ought to use the ladies' room, and if you're a dude, you ought to use the dudes' room.
00:04:12.000And here's Nancy Mace explaining her position on this.
00:04:15.000Is this effort in response to Congresswoman McBride's coming to Congress?
00:04:32.000I have PTSD from the abuse I've suffered at the hands of a man.
00:04:35.000And I know how vulnerable women and girls are in private spaces.
00:04:39.000So I'm absolutely a hundred percent gonna stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women's restroom, in our locker rooms, in our changing rooms.
00:04:49.000I will be there fighting you every step of the way.
00:04:53.000That is Nancy Mace being very clear, very concise, and very brutally honest.
00:04:57.000This, of course, has pissed off Hakeem Jeffries, who is the Democratic minority leader still.
00:05:02.000He had aspirations to be the Speaker of the House, but then again, he didn't actually win a majority.
00:05:05.000Here he was being very upset about all of this.
00:05:08.000As Catherine Clark indicated, the notion that this incoming small House Republican conference majority is beginning to To transition to the new Congress by bullying a member of Congress.
00:05:33.000Well, I mean, it seems like the lesson that you guys have drawn is to continue to maintain an absolute falsehood.
00:05:38.000And that falsehood has been pervaded throughout our culture, throughout our society, to the point where you are afraid to say basic things in common spaces like boys are boys and girls are girls.
00:05:48.000And it's so pervasive that it's been taken up by major advertisers, been taken up by major companies, like, for example, Jaguar.
00:05:54.000So there's an ad for Jaguar that's going around that is absolutely puzzling and bewildering.
00:05:58.000I don't know what they mean by this ad.
00:06:54.000As a civilization, I think that it is safe to say that when you have a norm, when you have a center to a civilization, people who don't actually abide by the rules of the center, it's actually not hard to tolerate...
00:07:06.000Those people as part of the system, because obviously if you have a center of gravity, then you have planets that are going to circle that center of gravity.
00:07:12.000When you decide, as the left has decided to do over the course of my lifetime, to destroy the center of gravity, when the center no longer holds, when instead the norm has been destroyed in the name of the fringe, well, eventually a new gravity will form.
00:07:25.000Eventually there will be a new center.
00:07:26.000And that new center, well, it turns out that the bulk of people, particularly in America, are still normies.
00:07:30.000And that new center is going to look a lot like the old center.
00:07:33.000And that is what is happening right now.
00:07:35.000That is what's happening with Team Trump.
00:07:36.000And the political effect of that is that if the left pushed too far in one direction, now the snapback is coming.
00:07:43.000So to take a wonderful example, Jay Bhattacharya is now being considered as a possible candidate to lead the National Institutes of Health.
00:07:53.000So we had Dr. Bhattacharya on very early in this program when he started becoming much more prominent on the national scene.
00:07:59.000He was the leader of something called the Great Barrington Declaration.
00:08:02.000The Great Barrington Declaration was a sort of heterodox view of what should be done about COVID. He suggested instead of these gigantic lockdowns, instead of mask mandates and all the rest, effectively speaking, You should do what actually I had suggested quite early on in the pandemic.
00:08:16.000We should trench out populations by health into the general public and allow those people to get COVID because they would live and they would be fine.
00:08:25.000And it would eventually create a general immunity to COVID. Which is effectively what happened because despite all the attempts to immunize the population and prevent the spread, the immunity didn't actually hold to prevent spread.
00:08:37.000It may have mitigated the effects of COVID for people who are very obese or very old, but for most people it didn't stop you from getting COVID or transmitting COVID in the first place.
00:08:45.000And so what actually ended the COVID threat Such as it was, was Omicron, was the commonality of a far milder strain of the virus.
00:08:55.000And Bhattacharya had basically recommended a strategy that would have produced precisely that, but faster.
00:09:02.000In fact, Dr. Anthony Fauci had used his assets at the NIH in order to prevent the work of the Great Barrington Declaration from being promulgated anywhere.
00:09:10.000He attempted to silence the voices surrounding the Great Barrington Declaration, including Dr. Bhattacharya.
00:09:17.000As the Washington Post reports, when three academics in October 2020 insisted it was time to roll back COVID lockdowns, writing an open letter known as the Great Barrington Declaration that attracted hundreds of thousands of signatures, public health leaders rebuked their proposal as premature.
00:09:29.000Francis Collins, then director of the NIH, privately dismissed the authors as fringe experts and called for a takedown of their suggestions to reopen schools and businesses, according to emails subsequently released under the Freedom of Information Act.
00:09:41.000Now, one of the authors of the declaration, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, appears poised for a top government health role, perhaps as head of NIH itself.
00:09:49.000Bhattacharya is a strong candidate to lead the nearly $50 billion agency in the coming Trump administration, with his name on an internal list of contenders being compiled by RFK Jr., The Rise of Adhacharya represents how the backlash to coronavirus policies has helped reshape conservative politics and elevate new voices.
00:10:06.000Well, the reality is so many of our institutions have been corrupted.
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00:12:18.000Get the help you need with Tax Network USA. Bhattacharya has testified before Congress about the crackdown on him.
00:12:24.000He offered advice to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, my home state governor, and other leaders navigating the pandemic.
00:12:29.000And Bhattacharya, of course, has won a wide variety of allies ranging from Peter Thiel to Elon Musk.
00:12:35.000And again, people like me were pushing Jay Bhattacharya's work pretty much as soon as he issued it back in October of 2020. He is the backlash.
00:12:43.000If you pervert the NIH and turn the NIH into a thoroughly political outfit dedicated to shutting down opposition viewpoints on the science, well, when Trump comes in, he's going to take the person you victimized and put him in charge of the NIH.
00:12:56.000The same thing is true of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
00:12:59.000Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's been ripped up and down for a variety of reasons.
00:13:03.000He's had heterodox and sometimes bizarre opinions on a wide variety of health issues.
00:13:09.000The reason that he is in position to take over HHS now is because the left decided to be so censorious about their approach to science that they actually ripped out any credibility that the scientific institutions had.
00:13:20.000When you have Anthony Fauci on TV suggesting that to disagree with him is to disagree with science as though he is some sort of great prophet descended from on high.
00:13:28.000Well, the revenge, the vengeance is going to be RFK Jr.
00:13:33.000Even the Wall Street Journal is now pointing this out.
00:13:36.000They say, Scientists, meanwhile, are trying to figure out how they could have managed the pandemic without setting off a populist movement they say threatens long-standing public health measures.
00:13:56.000Well, again, there is no way to prevent that if you insisted on top-down, heavy-handed control.
00:14:04.000No matter how tighter they grip the galaxy, the more star systems will slip through their fingers.
00:14:10.000That seems to be the message that the Trump vengeance is bringing.
00:14:15.000Now, again, there could be backlash to the backlash.
00:14:18.000If, as I expressed yesterday on the show, there is a Newton's third law of politics, that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction, if Republicans push too hard in one direction, then presumably there will be a backlash to that as well.
00:14:28.000But for now, what we are watching is a backlash to terrible policy, to public policy decided by scientists not on the basis of science.
00:14:36.000And again, it ran roughshod throughout the scientific community.
00:14:39.000One of the great untold stories of 2024 is how it's a backlash to the COVID regime of 2020. So, to take another example, this week, Laura Helmuth resigned as editor-in-chief of Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States, according to Reason Magazine.
00:15:05.000She accused Generation X of, quote, being full of effing fascists, complaining about how her home state of Indiana was sexist and racist.
00:15:12.000And she said, quote, eff them to the moon and back.
00:15:15.000But the reality, of course, is that Scientific American went under her tutelage from being a place where you actually read about science to a place where you read about politics.
00:15:25.000Scientific American ran a piece called Denial of Evolution is a Form of White Supremacy, which is absolutely absurd.
00:15:34.000Scientific American, while she was running it, suggested that the normal distribution is inherently suspect.
00:15:40.000Normal distribution just looks like a bell curve According to Reason, three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, Scientific American published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented, quote, his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.
00:15:55.000The author explained the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes there are default humans who act as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.
00:16:03.000And that goes back to the jaguar point.
00:16:12.000You end up with a discombobulated fringe running things, and nobody likes that.
00:16:17.000This is what Scientific American dedicated itself to doing.
00:16:20.000It's what Nature Magazine, by the way, dedicated itself to doing.
00:16:23.000Nature, probably the most prestigious scientific journal on planet Earth, blew itself out by making political pronouncements.
00:16:30.000That is how you end up with RFK Jr. The Washington Post actually has a piece and a podcast up From Leanna Nguyen and a wide variety of other columnists over at the Washington Post called RFK Jr. Has Some Good Ideas is What Makes Him So Dangerous.
00:16:47.000Now again, him having good ideas is not what makes him dangerous to them.
00:16:51.000It's the fact that he is more skeptical of scientific doctrine than they have been.
00:16:58.000Again, there could be an overcorrection, but the reality is that it is long overdue.
00:17:02.000The reaction is long overdue, and it's true on nearly every issue.
00:17:06.000Donald Trump is a reaction to the open borders left.
00:17:09.000The L.A. city council is so disconnected from reality, so disconnected from reality, and the backlash is here.
00:17:14.000When it comes to immigration policy, the L.A. city council has now voted unanimously, according to Bill Malugan of Fox, to adopt a sanctuary ordinance that will prohibit the use of any city personnel or resources for any federal immigration enforcement.
00:17:28.000LAPD's new chief says his officers will not participate in federal immigration enforcement.
00:17:34.000Former LA Mayor Eric Garcetti issued an executive order in 2019 to protect illegal immigrants.
00:17:39.000LAPD is already prohibited from asking about immigration status when they arrest people, which means there are illegal immigrants who are criminals in the city of Los Angeles who are wandering around.
00:17:47.000The ordinance puts those sanctuary policies on the city's books.
00:17:52.000Well, the backlash to that is Tom Holman, who is now going to enforce the law.
00:17:56.000The backlash is thorough and it is well-deserved.
00:17:59.000In the world of defense, the woking of the American military, the backlash to that is Pete Hegseth.
00:18:04.000So Mike Gallagher, former representative from Wisconsin, who himself served in the military and who I've recommended as a possible fantastic Secretary of the Navy under Pete Hegseth, He heartily supports Hegseth.
00:18:17.000Well, because he recognizes, like everybody else who's a military policy expert, that the administrative state, the woke military, by administrative fiat, is a disaster area.
00:18:26.000And so Donald Trump is here to wreak vengeance upon it.
00:18:33.000You obviously know him better than I do.
00:18:35.000Some people are criticizing the pick as disruptive.
00:18:38.000Well, the Pentagon is in need of disruption.
00:18:41.000And I think taking a hard look at the Pentagon bureaucracy, finding a way to reduce the almost 900,000 DOD civilians and reinvest that money into weapons, Again,
00:19:11.000Gallagher would make a great Secretary of the Navy.
00:19:13.000There needs to be people in these positions who are going to clean out these authoritarian administrative institutions.
00:19:19.000It's the great untold story of the last over a century in American politics is the takeover of administrative institutions and the perversion of those administrative institutions against their original causes.
00:19:29.000The same thing is going to happen in the world of education.
00:19:31.000So President Trump has now called upon Linda McMahon as his education secretary.
00:19:37.000Now, it's amazing how the media are covering this.
00:19:38.000They're, of course, treating her as the ex-wife of former WWE CEO Vince McMahon.
00:19:43.000But the reality, of course, is that McMahon has already served as the transition co-chair and former Small Business Administration head.
00:19:50.000She's also been the chair of the board at the America First Policy Institute, which is sort of the think tank that is outside the government that has been coming up with a lot of the Trump agenda.
00:20:00.000Trump said in a statement for the past four years as chair of the board at AFPI, Linda has been a fierce advocate for parents' rights, working hard at both AFPI and America First Works to achieve universal school choice in 12 states, giving children the opportunity to receive an excellent education, regardless of zip code or income.
00:20:15.000As Secretary of Education, Linda will fight tirelessly to expand choice to every state in America and empower parents to make the best education decisions for their families.
00:20:23.000That, of course, is in fact the best thing that she could do.
00:20:28.000If you want the number one predictor of movement in the electorate, it would be the possibility of school choice.
00:20:33.000Taking kids out of the hands of the absolutely corrupt and terrible National Educational Association and putting them in the hands of parochial schools because parents wish to send their kids to better schools.
00:20:44.000There's very little that would be better for the children of America than universal school choice.
00:20:47.000I know I live in a universal school choice state, Florida, and it's made the state way the hell better.
00:20:56.000Universal school choice, fostered at the federal level, made easier at the federal level, would be a wonderful thing.
00:21:02.000If the Department of Education isn't to be eliminated completely, and it's kind of difficult to eliminate departments, it requires 60 votes in the Senate in order to do that.
00:21:08.000If you're not going to do that, at least the Department of Education can be thoroughly cleansed.
00:21:13.000And that means, not just universal school choice, she's going to be looking at college endowments, as she should.
00:21:18.000If they're in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as many of them are with regard to allowing anti-Semitism, for example, their endowments should be looked at.
00:21:28.000Not only that, the truth is that FAFSA, which is the Federal Student Loan Program, should be looked at to determine whether, in fact, we're incentivizing people to take on debts that they can never pay back.
00:21:39.000Is that a smart thing to continue to propagate a system that gets people hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, no matter how long it takes to pay off, just to get a degree in a useless subject when in reality they should just be looking at entering the workforce?
00:21:52.000Beyond that, she would assume is also going to take a look at Title IX. She's going to be looking at Title IX policies.
00:21:59.000One of the terrible things that has been switched since the Trump administration is that there are vague accusations made against particularly men on college campuses.
00:22:08.000There are no actual administrative procedures that are put in place for sexual harassment accusations.
00:22:14.000And then kids, their lives are ruined because those accusations are just used as an excuse to destroy their educational career.
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00:24:43.000Get involved and select Daily Wire in the How Did You Hear About Us section.
00:24:46.000So on his way out of office, Joe Biden is once again, just as Democrats do, I don't know what their obsession is with this, but Democrats have a habit.
00:24:54.000On their way out of office, Joe Biden did this, is doing this now.
00:24:57.000Barack Obama, of course, did this pretty famously when he left office in 2016. On their way out, they just take a backhanded slap at Israel.
00:25:06.000Maybe it's to please the progressive base.
00:25:08.000I have to assume that's what it is, considering Bernie Sanders is calling for a full-on arms embargo against the state of Israel as Israel is within sniffing distance of full-on defeating Hamas and full-on defeating Hezbollah in Lebanon.
00:25:20.000Well now, apparently, the UN Security Council is slated to vote on an alleged anti-Israel resolution published by Algeria to impose an end on the Jewish state's war of self-defense against Hamas.
00:25:31.000And now the Biden administration has gone silent about how it's going to vote.
00:25:53.000So, Senator Ted Cruz says, Apparently, Fox News Digital reported last week that U.N. experts believe Biden's administration might seek to replicate Obama's parting shot at Israel.
00:26:12.000A U.S. State Department spokesperson told Fox News Digital, quote, we don't have a comment to offer on allegedly leaked information, nor do we preview our actions at the Security Council.
00:26:22.000So, again, the pending draft resolution, it's a little bit unclear what exactly that looks like, but...
00:26:30.000Apparently, it is going to call for a unilateral end to the war in Gaza, rip Israel on a humanitarian basis, and basically make no demands that are in any way enforceable with regard to the release of hostages.
00:26:42.000Well, the backlash is here, and it's coming.
00:26:47.000Again, Democrats right now are completely split on this issue.
00:26:50.000Some Democrats, like Bernie Sanders, who hates Israel and is, again, about as Jewish as a ham sandwich, They continue to rip on Israel at every available opportunity.
00:26:58.000Even the New York Times is noticing the gap inside the Democratic Party.
00:27:00.000Quote, Democrats whose support for Israel has been strained by the wars in Gaza and Lebanon appear headed for a series of tests in the coming weeks over continuing to back Israel's right-wing government and the attendant debate over anti-Semitism and the anti-Israel left.
00:27:11.000Again, it's hilarious that every time the New York Times or any other publication talks about the Israeli government and Gaza and Lebanon, they talk about Israel's right-wing government.
00:27:35.000People in the center, people on the left agree with that.
00:27:37.000In fact, there are some people in the center and left who want to go more aggressively in Lebanon than the current government is going.
00:27:42.000Nonetheless, Democrats, because again, they are tied, they are wedded to this pro-Hamas base, they can't let go of it.
00:27:47.000According to the New York Times, Senator Chuck Schumer is likely to test the unity of the Democratic Party and American Jews who have long called it their political home.
00:27:54.000He plans to attach to a bill legislation to define anti-Semitism formally with language that includes his phrases more about opposition to Israel than about hatred of Judaism.
00:28:02.000Well, he's doing that, obviously, much too late.
00:28:07.000Of course, you see that these UN resolutions are going to be dividing the Democratic Party as well.
00:28:13.000Well, all of that is going to come to a crashing halt as soon as Republicans take office.
00:28:17.000The incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune, he says, listen, as soon as this administration has gone, something different is on its way.
00:28:25.000I am calling on Leader Schumer to bring a bill to the floor sanctioning in the ICC, which the House has already passed on a bipartisan basis.
00:28:36.000And if he refuses to act, our Senate Republican majority next year will.
00:28:41.000We will stand with Israel and make this and other supportive legislation a top priority in the next Congress.
00:28:48.000So to our allies in Israel, And to the Jewish people around the world, my message to you is this.
00:28:59.000Again, he doesn't mean that in terms of military reinforcements.
00:29:01.000He just means that the Republican Senate is not going to be standing for the kind of trash being pushed by the outgoing Biden administration.
00:29:09.000That is also true with regards to economics.
00:29:11.000The Biden administration decided that the way to actually heal the American economy was to artificially boost the price of labor.
00:29:19.000That is why you saw Joe Biden on, for example, picket lines.
00:29:21.000It's why you saw Joe Biden intervene multiple times in labor disputes on behalf of unions that were paying the freight for his re-elect campaign.
00:29:28.000It's why Joe Biden decided to blow trillions of dollars into an already overheated economy.
00:29:33.000Well, the American people were tired of that.
00:30:00.000If tariffs are going to damage the economy, he ain't going to do it.
00:30:02.000And if tariffs are going to help the economy, he's going to do it.
00:30:05.000If tariffs are leveraged against foreign opposition, he will use them.
00:30:08.000And if they turn out to be useless, he will not use them, which is why he's currently considering a person named Kevin Warsh as a new candidate to serve as Treasury Secretary.
00:30:16.000According to Politico, Warsh, who's a leading contender for the job, once served in President George W. Bush's White House and then as the youngest Federal Reserve Board member in the Central Bank's history.
00:30:26.000He has spoken about the importance of free trade, the political independence of the Fed, and a strong dollar.
00:30:31.000Warsh has a few things in common with the president, however.
00:30:34.000Wall Street would love it if he got the job.
00:30:37.000His father-in-law, Ronald Louder, is a decades-long friend of President Trump.
00:30:40.000He's already playing a key role within the transition.
00:30:42.000Even some of the most populous members of Trump's coalition are embracing him.
00:30:46.000One former Trump administration official said, quote, bringing people like Kevin in would demonstrate that the broad coalition of support Trump has assembled across the country is equally broad among those in the business world.
00:30:55.000Now, again, there is some blowback to some of the more tariff friendly members of the Trump administration.
00:31:05.000However, the reality is that even if Donald Trump were to pick Warsh, that doesn't mean he's necessarily going to be pro free trade.
00:31:12.000He's going to do what he feels he has to do.
00:31:15.000Remember, he used all this language about tariffs the first time around, and then he used it mainly as leverage to get America's geopolitical opponents over the table.
00:31:22.000Meanwhile, Howard Lutnick, who had been considered as a possible Treasury Secretary, has been tapped as Commerce Secretary.
00:31:29.000Again, that's a pick that makes some sense.
00:31:32.000According to Politico, Trump put out a statement saying, quote, Suggested, quote, he has been outrageously successful in life under the most adverse setback on your heels circumstance that life can throw at you.
00:31:52.000And that's a reference to the fact that he rebuilt Cantor Fitzgerald after September 11th.
00:31:57.000That was the terrorist attack that killed 658 of the company's employees, including his own brother.
00:32:02.000Loomis wrote, quote, Howard rebuilt the business of the powerhouse it is again today and helped make the families who lost loved ones whole financially.
00:32:08.000So this is a guy who has both a heart and a drive to succeed.
00:32:13.000So again, Trump is putting together a very solid team here.
00:32:16.000The team is about breaking things and moving quickly.
00:32:29.000First, today we are celebrating a monumental achievement by one of the most prominent and influential voices of our time, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.
00:32:34.000He has officially reached his 500th show episode.
00:33:28.000On a business level, according to the Wall Street Journal, We're good to go.
00:33:52.000As a result, the US's trade deficit with China rose in 2018 before falling in 2019. Already, exports from China surged last month.
00:33:59.000Some economists think that was driven at least in part by front-loading, people buying the stuff before they think it's going to be tariffed.
00:34:04.000But all of that is simply a predicate to what happens next, which is a shifting of production outside of China.
00:34:10.000China is still the world's top exporter of goods, and the US is still its top buyer.
00:34:15.000American companies bought roughly $430 billion of Chinese goods last year.
00:34:19.000Computer and electronic products make up the biggest chunk of that, but cut off the American markets to the Chinese.
00:35:05.000It's not like somebody just fires a shot and magically World War III breaks out.
00:35:09.000Typically, the situation has to be right in order for everybody to go weapons up.
00:35:13.000And that's usually when one side misperceives its own strength.
00:35:17.000Well, if the United States flexes muscle, it'll be much more difficult for China to misperceive its own strength.
00:35:23.000According to the Wall Street Journal, some economists doubt the U.S. will succeed in raising tariffs to 60% across the board on Chinese products.
00:35:30.000But economists at Goldman Sachs predict additional duties on China could average out to a 20 percentage point increase in the effective tariff rate, which would be really, really significant.
00:35:41.000Well, obviously, listen, for American consumers, it means higher prices because that's what tariffs are.
00:35:46.000It also means a rethinking of America's national security needs vis-a-vis China, which is a good thing.
00:35:52.000And this also means the United States is going to have to, as I say, increase its leverage on other countries with how they deal with China.
00:35:58.000According to the New York Times, as they gathered this week in South America, many of the world's leaders were engaged in a delicate diplomatic dance with President Xi Jinping of China.
00:36:06.000Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, called for a consistent, durable relationship with China.
00:36:10.000Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia, pledged to be patient, calibrated, and deliberate.
00:36:15.000President Biden promised not to let competition veer into conflict.
00:36:18.000As the United States makes a transition from Biden to Trump, presidents and prime ministers around the world are searching for stability, particularly when it comes to China.
00:36:25.000Xi told Biden he wanted to maintain a stable, healthy, sustainable relationship with the United States.
00:36:30.000But potential conflicts with China loom on human rights, the fate of Taiwan, technology competition, cyber attacks, aid to Russia, and tariffs.
00:36:37.000So the term that's been used for the Trump administration policy on China is decoupling, And that is something that absolutely should be pursued with alacrity.
00:36:47.000Because continuing to feed the alligator hoping it will eat you last is an extraordinarily poor strategy.
00:36:53.000Now Xi is issuing warnings to other people in attendance.
00:36:57.000According to the New York Times, while promising to abide by a commitment to, quote, mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and winning cooperation, the Chinese leader also said, quote, our position of resolutely safeguarding China's sovereignty, security, and development interests remains unchanged.
00:37:12.000Again, this is a place where Donald Trump has led historically.
00:37:22.000I know congresspeople on both sides of the aisle.
00:37:24.000There are very few things on which they agree.
00:37:26.000The one thing they agree on is the rising threat of China.
00:37:29.000Again, this is one of the reasons why I think that Pete Hegseth is going to make a great Secretary of Defense and why I'm urging him to pick as Secretary of the Navy Mike Gallagher, who's been on top of this, really on top of this, in terms of defense of the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.
00:37:42.000So as China grows more militant, it is worth noting, by the way, that all of the sort of happy talk, the world of fantasy that has dominated American foreign policy thinking for years, It's so ridiculous.
00:37:56.000There's a piece in the New York Times today talking about the fact that China's emissions are growing faster than literally any other place on Earth.
00:38:04.000And for all the talk from John Kerry on how we need to cooperate with the Chinese on climate to save the world.
00:38:12.000You know who doesn't give a crap about that?
00:38:17.000They're in an exponential growth curve in terms of emissions.
00:38:21.000Projections show that China is probably going to exceed cumulative emissions over the course of the next few decades.
00:38:30.000According to the New York Times, for many years, wealthy places like the United States and Europe have had the biggest historical responsibility for global warming.
00:38:37.000China's astonishing rise is upending that dynamic.
00:38:39.000Over the past three decades, China has built more than 1,000 coal-fired power plants, as the economy has grown more than 40-fold.
00:38:46.000The country has become by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gases on planet Earth.
00:38:51.000The United States has been dropping since about the year 2000. The European Union the same.
00:38:55.000China has increased its emissions per year from approximately 4 gigatons in the year 2000 to somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 gigatons today.
00:39:09.000Last year, for the first time, passed Europe as the second largest historical emitter.
00:40:04.000And they're going to rely on the stupidity of the West in continuing to fund their growth.
00:40:09.000Well, I think with Donald Trump, a lot of that stuff is going to come to an end.
00:40:13.000As the Wall Street Journal points out, when Brazilian President Luiz Anasio Lula de Silva called for more multilateralism at the opening of the Group of 20 Nations Summit on Monday, the remark appeared aimed at Donald Trump.
00:40:24.000Many leaders from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa at the G20 made clear their alarm at the prospects for a sharp U.S. turn inward on trade, health, and environmental policy with Trump's looming return to the presidency.
00:40:34.000When they say a turn inward, by the way, What they mean is that the United States is no longer going to sacrifice our sovereign interest to some specious international standard that helps other nations at our expense.
00:40:45.000That is not a thing that we are going to do.
00:40:48.000And the reality is other countries are already adjusting, and that is a good thing.
00:40:54.000According to the Wall Street Journal, some leaders seemed more intent on signaling to Trump that they were open to cutting deals that spared their economies and established defense arrangements from too much disruption.
00:41:03.000Others sought to remind the president-elect that their countries gave more to the US in the form of investments than they cost Washington in overseas alliance commitments and other favorite Trump targets.
00:41:21.000You know, world leaders, the truth is, Trump is much more predictable than Joe Biden.
00:41:26.000Because when you speak in the name of airy-fairy ideas, when you just say, we're for democracy, everyone knows that the United States is not going to be consistent in that approach.
00:41:35.000That some democracies are going to be supported and others are going to be sold down the river.
00:41:42.000When the United States speaks in terms of human rights, everybody looks at the United States and says, okay, we understand you sometimes care about that and sometimes you really, really don't.
00:42:02.000So President Trump is now pushing for both Vladimir Zelensky and Vladimir Putin to talk to him to try and broker a deal, to try to broker an off-ramp as soon as possible.
00:43:12.000Meanwhile, a bit of controversy has broken out between President Trump and the Republican Senate, not over his nominees, but over the inability of Republican senators to show up on time to vote to stop the majority leader Chuck Schumer's ramming through of Joe Biden's judicial confirmations.
00:43:26.000According to Breitbart.com, Trump's comments made on Truth Social followed Senate Democrats confirming a controversial judge Monday night in a close vote, as well as a handful of other Biden picks.
00:43:35.000Several Republican senators were absent from the vote.
00:43:38.000Trump tweeted, quote, The Democrats are trying to stack the courts with radical left judges on their way out the door.
00:43:43.000Republican senators need to show up and hold the line.
00:43:45.000No more judges confirmed before inauguration day.
00:43:48.000One of those judges is U.S. Magistrate Judge Embry Kidd for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
00:43:54.000Well, he was nominated despite the objections of both of his home state senators.
00:43:58.000Embry has been accused of failing to disclose to the Senate Judiciary Committee two of his decisions to release child sex offenders before trial.
00:44:05.000He also contributed to a law review article criticizing capital child rape laws as racist.
00:44:10.000Despite Republican absences, it's possible the Democrats would have been able to confirm the judges anyway.
00:44:15.000With that said, Republicans failing to show up for their Senate votes is probably not a wonderful thing, considering that, again, many of the Democrats are not currently showing.
00:44:24.000That included Senators like J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio.
00:44:27.000Some of them had conflicts or couldn't make it.
00:44:30.000But, again, the reality is that all of these nominees for the Democrats should receive the full measure of Republican ire and prevention of them from getting on the court.
00:44:40.000Once they're on, it's almost impossible to get them off.
00:44:42.000And Donald Trump, of course, is right about this.
00:44:54.000These institutions are there to serve as a check and as a balance.
00:44:58.000They are there in order to serve, if you're a Republican senator, as votes on President Trump's nominees.
00:45:03.000And we ought to give a full hearing to each one of these candidates in the same way that I want those senators there to vote against bad judicial nominees.
00:45:10.000I want those senators there to vote, yay or nay, on Donald Trump's actual nominees.
00:45:15.000That is legitimately their job under the Constitution of the United States.
00:45:19.000All right, coming up, we're going to jump into the vaunted Ben Shapiro Show mailbag.
00:45:23.000Remember, you have to be a subscriber to have your question answered.