Dems claim that Republicans threaten democracy while simultaneously threatening democracy, and we examine whether the real threat to the American economy is inflation or complete government-driven stagnation. Ben Shapiro explains why the threat to American democracy is not from the right, but from the left, and how the authoritarian left seeks to centralize power in pretty much every major institution in American life, including the Justice Department, the media, and academia, and the scientific and academic establishment, and stifle all dissent from its opponents in order to advance their ideological agenda. Ben Shapiro: The real threat is not inflation, it's from the Democratic Party, and that's why we need checks and balances, because the real danger to our democracy comes from the Left, not from Big Tech, Big Government, and Big Money. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. It s time to stand up to big tech, protect your data, and protect your rights at ExpressVpn. Slasher Ben Shapiro, we'll get to all the news in just one moment, so you can get to the bottom line in just a moment! Subscribe to the Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to Ben Shapiro's other podcast, The Ben Shapiro Podcast. The Weekly Standard - Rate/subscribe to his newest podcast, "The Weekly Standard" wherever you get your eardrums are listening to the latest viral videos on social media. If you like what you're listening to, you'll get 20% off your favorite premium epsiode, subscribe for the rest of the week's newest episode of the show? Subscribe for a chance to win a FREE 7-day trial, plus a discount of $10 off your first month of the latest issue of The Ben and Jerry's newest book, "Ben Shapiro's newest issue, "Shark Tank" and more! FREE FASTEST PRICING SPECIAL OFFER? Shout it out to Ben and Ben Shapiro on his new book "The Best of the Week?" Subscribe and review it out on Audible? Learn more at Ben Shapiro is a supporter of the Weekly Standard? Get exclusive ad-free and more than $50 off your ad-only promo code: The Best of Ben Shapiro and other VIP access to the world's Best Podcasts? at and get a discount code: Ben Shapiro will be giving you access to all of that?
00:00:20.000It's time to stand up to big tech, protect your data at expressvpn.com.
00:00:24.000Slash Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
00:00:27.000First, if you can save a lot of money on your cell phone bill, why would you not do this?
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00:01:43.000The constant theme from the Democrats and from the media these days is that there is a deep, abiding threat to American democracy.
00:01:51.000And I think there are certainly threats to American democracy.
00:01:53.000I just don't think they are coming from where the left says they are coming from.
00:01:56.000I think that the great threat to American democracy these days, and to a civilized way of life, is the authoritarian left that is on the move inside every American institution.
00:02:04.000An authoritarian left that is seeking to centralize power and to quash all dissent from its opponents in pretty much every major institution in American life.
00:02:12.000Whether we're talking about the scientific institutions or whether we're talking about our educational institutions, certainly the media that push forward this authoritarianism.
00:02:20.000I mean, the press openly root at this point for those who dissent to be quashed.
00:02:25.000They openly attempt to push social media, another institution dominated by leftists, to shut down people who disagree.
00:02:32.000And that's not even getting to the governmental policy that is now being pushed by the Democrats, which is overtly racist and discriminatory, which is government policy that is directed at seizing money from the private sector and sucking the money out, and then apparently blowing the money back in, but into all the wrong places.
00:02:49.000And completely redoing the way democracy has historically been done in the United States.
00:03:40.000And some people on the left aren't even shy about this, right?
00:03:42.000Ibram X. Kendi, who's the ideological...
00:03:45.000grandfather at this point of the entire democratic agenda.
00:03:49.000Ibram X. Kendi has openly stated and pushed for a department of anti-racism, a federal department of anti-racism, where there would be a bureaucratic department inside the Justice Department, presumably, and their entire job, or be a cabinet-level department, their entire job would be to strike down any law, state, local, or federal, That ends with disparate impact, right?
00:04:12.000That ends by impacting different racial groups differently, or that ends with inequality of outcome.
00:04:19.000And the left isn't being shy about all of this.
00:04:20.000And yet, at the same time, the left is demagoguing all of this by suggesting that the right is the true threat to democracy.
00:04:25.000Now, I'm not going to pretend that there aren't people on the right who have wanted to quote-unquote overthrow the system.
00:04:30.000And when you have Defy, like, Michael Flynn out there suggesting that we should have a Myanmar-like coup.
00:04:38.000Obviously, that is going to be fuel on the fire for the Democrats.
00:04:41.000But when we're talking about who has institutional power, who's actually attempting to do this right now, it is important to recognize that the left is playing up January 6th because the true authoritarian threat to the country, meaning the threat that is most likely to succeed, is not a bunch of droogs running into the Capitol building on January 6th and then within hours being dissipated and All of the mechanisms of the republic moving forward as normal.
00:05:06.000The real threat is the overarching change that the left wishes to bring to the country.
00:05:12.000And yet the left pretends that it is not the aggressor in this.
00:05:15.000The left has been pushing on every single front.
00:05:17.000They've been pushing cultural radicalism.
00:05:19.000They've been pushing racial polarization.
00:05:21.000They've been pushing the breakdown of democratic institutions.
00:05:24.000They want to get rid of the filibuster.
00:05:27.000I mean, you had the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, literally say yesterday that we have a serious problem in the United States when Wyoming has as many votes in the Senate as California.
00:05:38.000The system was specifically designated so that the states have the power to check federal ambition.
00:05:44.000This is one of the purposes of the checks and balances of the Constitution of the United States.
00:05:49.000This is what I talk about in my new book, The Authoritarian Moment, which comes out in July, is the fact that if we're talking about the true authoritarian threat, the true authoritarian threat is not a bunch of crazy people and idiots saying ridiculous things on Twitter.
00:06:05.000The real threat is people taking over actively institutions and then weaponizing those institutions against dissent while overthrowing the checks and balances that protect individual rights.
00:06:13.000That's the actual authoritarian threat in the United States right now.
00:06:17.000And the left has to demagogue this because if they can accuse the right of doing what they themselves are doing, if they can distract you over here with the shiny object, then you might not notice the fact that they are actually pushing for mobocracy and bureaucratic top-down rule.
00:06:58.000We just created that narrative out of whole cloth.
00:07:01.000We lied about when we started negotiating with the Iranians, said Ben Rhodes.
00:07:04.000And he admitted that he had an echo chamber of journalists, sycophantic journalists like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, who would just do his bidding.
00:07:10.000He said there were a bunch of young journalists who didn't know anything about the Middle East, and they would just do whatever Ben Rhodes wanted.
00:07:15.000So Ben Rhodes has admitted to lying to the media.
00:07:34.000The election that broke the country in serious ways that have yet to be repaired was 2012, when the most decent person, in terms of just personal decency, who has run for public office in a very long time, Mitt Romney, was beaten by a president who was presiding over an extraordinarily slow recovery from a deep economic recession.
00:07:53.000Who had pushed a deeply unpopular Obamacare program, who had blown out the spending, and who then engaged in a complete rewriting of how politics was done in the United States.
00:08:01.000I think it is completely underrated what Barack Obama did between 2010 and 2012.
00:08:05.000Between 2010 when he lost Congress and 2012 when he won re-election with a large number of votes.
00:08:10.000He lost several million votes from 2008.
00:08:12.000He still won in 2012, becoming the first president in a very long time to win re-election by losing votes between the two elections.
00:08:19.000What Barack Obama did at that point was truly astonishing.
00:08:22.000He completely redid the way American politics was done.
00:08:25.000Instead of attempting to appeal to the broadest possible audience, Barack Obama decided he was going to throw out SOPs to a variety of identity-related groups, and then he was going to militarize that coalition against the quote-unquote prevailing white ascendancy.
00:09:06.000What if there were a service that alleviated these problems for you and did so at a fraction of the cost of like an HR professional who costs like 70 grand a year?
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00:10:15.000But the reality is, when you are overtly using government policies to cater to people of particular races, you are stopping multiracial democracy from working.
00:10:23.000Multiracial democracy can only work when there are no preferences based on race.
00:10:29.000But it's Democrats who are pushing overt policy, government policy, that has racial discrimination written into the policy.
00:10:35.000Here is Ben Rhodes doing a fair bit of gaslighting right here.
00:10:39.000Whether we're dealing with Russia or China, the most important thing the United States can do, I've come to believe, and this book was the whole process of learning this, is not any foreign policy.
00:10:52.000The most powerful thing that people want from us around the world is not any one foreign policy.
00:10:57.000It's that we can demonstrate that a multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracy can work.
00:11:03.000And we have a lot of work to do to demonstrate that reality.
00:11:07.000Okay, for the left, everything is a lever for the kind of change they are pushing.
00:11:11.000Notice how Ben Rhodes is saying, you know, to fight Russia, to fight China, we don't actually have to have a strong military or a strong foreign policy.
00:11:19.000When you get the same thing from Joe Biden, he'll say, you know, in order to change China, in order to fight China, we need to, come on, man.
00:11:28.000What that translates as, in order to fight China, we need to spend $6 trillion a year in the budget.
00:11:34.000And we need to spend a huge amount of that on racially reparative policy.
00:12:00.000There is a reason why America leads the world in virtually every economic and freedom category on a wide variety of issues until as of late apparently.
00:12:10.000The reason for that is because it is inherent in the system and in a culture that Americans used to share with regard to God and community and social fabric and that has been almost completely blown up at this point by government interventionism and a social left on the march.
00:12:24.000But the goal here, everything for the left, is about internal change.
00:12:26.000It is never about fighting the bad guys.
00:12:28.000It's never about standing up to China.
00:12:30.000It's never about standing up to Russia.
00:12:32.000This is why, when Donald Trump was president, their main focus was not... Trump would stand up to China.
00:13:24.000First of all, if France were more like America, we wouldn't have to go over there every so often and save their asses from the Nazis.
00:13:29.000But aside from that, France is becoming more like America, and it's terrible.
00:13:32.000The reason that people in France have been saying that France is becoming more like America is because they have adopted a lot of the racially polarizing politics of the United States.
00:13:58.000And we are going to fight for values that we hold dear.
00:14:01.000We are going to cling to values that have undergirded classical liberalism and traditional values morality for hundreds of years when it comes to government and thousands of years when it comes to those values.
00:14:14.000He'll get to this piece in just a second, because it really is telling.
00:14:16.000It's really telling how the left does this gaslighting routine.
00:14:40.000I need to keep an eye on my house, particularly when I am not at home.
00:14:43.000And this is why I love my Ring devices.
00:14:45.000There are a thousand reasons why protecting your home matters to you.
00:14:49.000If somebody stops by, something's going on outdoors around the house, Ring lets me know.
00:14:52.000It's peace of mind anytime knowing that our home is protected.
00:14:55.000The moment, literally, I'm not kidding you.
00:14:57.000The day we moved from California to Florida, first words out of my wife's mouth, we need to get Ring devices on the house so we know what's going on.
00:15:04.000It provides us a sense of safety and security.
00:15:38.000Okay, so there's this piece in the New York Times that really is very telling.
00:15:41.000For some of these critics, it's the reason so many young people adopting the view of Black Lives Matter activists believe police violence is a problem.
00:15:46.000cabinet, to the far-right opposition, from print columnists to talking heads, Americanization is increasingly held responsible for a whole set of social ills ailing the nation.
00:15:55.000For some of these critics, it's the reason so many young people adopting the view of Black Lives Matter activists believe police violence is a problem.
00:16:01.000For others, it explains why the quality of academic research is in decline, as fanciful ideas concocted on American college campuses like intersectionality and post-colonialism supposedly flourish.
00:16:10.000To others still, it's why people can't speak their mind anymore suffocated by the threats of cancel culture.
00:16:14.000Perhaps the most common gripe is that ideas and practices imported from the United States are making the French obsessed with ethnic, religious, and sexual difference at the expense of their shared identity as citizens of the Universal Republic.
00:16:26.000French politics are in fact becoming Americanized.
00:16:27.000Okay, so it seems like this columnist is going to say, yes, the left.
00:16:31.000From the left's perspective, it is the right that is the problem.
00:16:37.000The problem is not left-wing theories or censorious scolds.
00:16:40.000It's the rise of an insular nationalistic right-wing discourse, driven by a belligerent style of press coverage, distinctively French in content, the form this discourse takes.
00:16:48.000Grievance-swallowing hosts conjuring embittered conversations about national decline, immigration, and religion follows America's lead.
00:16:54.000As in the United States, the result is a degraded political landscape that empowers the far right, dragging mainstream politicians into its orbit.
00:17:01.000Culture wars are America's true gift to France.
00:17:04.000Okay, so instead of recognizing that America right now has moved into a period of deep political polarization because the left is speeding so fast to the left.
00:17:14.000I mean, they're Thelma and Louise off the cliff.
00:18:30.000All that happened is that the right stopped surrendering on every single issue because they finally reached some core issues they couldn't surrender on.
00:18:37.000It's the left that has pushed these culture wars.
00:18:39.000It is the left that has decided to polarize Americans around issues that would have been considered absolutely Uncontroversial, even 10 years ago.
00:18:48.00010 years ago, it would have been considered an uncontroversial idea that a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl.
00:18:51.000That would have been considered absolutely conventional in 2010, 2011.
00:18:56.000Now, you say that sort of stuff and you're afraid that your business is going to fire you.
00:19:00.000The left's culture wars have driven this.
00:19:03.000And then the left says, well, if we can't get done what we want to get done, it's the checks and balances that have to go.
00:19:09.000The woke cultural left has moved into the governmental left.
00:19:15.000And that merger is creating tremendous rifts in American public life.
00:19:35.000They'd be seen in exactly the same way as Cynthia McKinney was seen inside the Democratic Party, who was the last Democrat who apparently Democrats were able to condemn.
00:19:44.000Now you have Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Alexander Ocasio-Cortez leading the squad as an ideological threat inside the halls of Congress.
00:19:51.000Don't tell me the right started this fire.
00:19:58.000As I've said many times, Donald Trump himself, I know the left wants to treat it as though the universe began spinning when Donald Trump became president, but that's not true.
00:20:04.000He performed exactly in line with other Republican candidates.
00:20:08.000He won about the same percentage of the popular vote as Mitt Romney did.
00:20:11.000The reason for that is because the left has created a hard core on the right of people who are going to resist them, and the more they push, the more resistance there will be.
00:20:19.000And then, of course, they'll blame you, and they'll blame democracy.
00:20:22.000I mean, look how far they've pushed on culture.
00:20:24.000So yesterday, there was a video making the rounds on the internet of a girl in Texas who was valedictorian of her high school.
00:20:30.000And instead of reading her valedictory address, which had been pre-approved, which is typically how this is done at high schools all around the nation.
00:20:37.000Instead, she got up and she decided to rant about abortion and how abortion was a wonderful thing for women.
00:21:00.000And we have spent our entire lives working towards our future.
00:21:04.000And without our input, and without our consent, our control over that future has been stripped away from us.
00:21:12.000I am terrified that if my contraceptives fail, I am terrified that if I am raped, then my hopes and aspirations and dreams and efforts for my future will no longer matter.
00:21:26.000Okay, what she's saying is morally horrifying, right?
00:21:28.000She's saying that her hopes and aspirations rely on killing a baby in the womb.
00:21:33.000She throws in rape there, but the reality is that the vast majority of people who are having abortions in the United States, as in on the order of over 99%, are not people who have been raped or are victims of incest.
00:21:43.000The vast majority of people who have abortions in the United States are having abortions because they don't want the baby.
00:21:49.000But that is treated not only as mainstream political rhetoric these days, that abortion is a fundamental good.
00:22:11.000But the idea here that abortion is the sole guarantor, that it is the last available battlement before women's rights are breached is an insane one, but the left has fully embraced this.
00:22:20.000To the point where Andrew Cuomo was lighting up buildings in New York pink after they passed a basic abortion on demand up until point of birth bill in New York.
00:22:39.000Beto O'Rourke tweeted, Paxton, thank you for having the courage of your convictions and inspiring Texas with your refusal to accept injustice as the price of participation in civic life bra.
00:22:50.000Maybe I'll use our place in this democracy to fight for what we believe to be right and follow your example.
00:22:55.000Yeah, you should follow her example by, you know, shouting about how abortion is just an indubitable moral good.
00:23:21.000The culture wars are being driven by the left.
00:23:23.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:23:25.000First, let us talk about the fact that if you are waiting in line at an auto parts store right now, get out of the line, go home, go to rockauto.com.
00:23:32.000You don't want to be waiting in that line.
00:23:33.000You're going to get to the front of the line.
00:23:34.000And then when you get to the front of the line, the first thing that's going to happen is they're going to ask you a bunch of questions you don't know the answer to.
00:23:38.000Then after 10 minutes of wrangling, they're finally going to say, oh, wait, man, we don't have that part in the back.
00:25:43.000Okay, so when The Bachelor, which again is a very popular TV show in the United States, ousts its host for the great sin of having said that a girl should have grace.
00:25:54.000For having, when she was 19 years old, gone to an antebellum ball at her college.
00:25:57.000He loses his hosting gig, and he's now apparently not returning to Bachelor in Paradise.
00:26:02.000All of this over saying the same thing that this girl's black boyfriend was saying at the time before he decided to reverse himself and take the woke position that his girlfriend was actually evil.
00:26:11.000Apparently, she's now back with him, which is, frankly, an incredible lack of self-esteem.
00:26:15.000I mean, seriously, note to all ladies, if your boyfriend publicly calls you a racist and says you have work to do, you shouldn't be with him.
00:26:22.000Okay, but put that aside, Chris Harrison, who wasn't even involved in that core relationship, has now lost his job.
00:26:29.000And by the way, the ratings for The Bachelor are gonna pay the price here.
00:26:31.000According to Variety, Chris Harrison's future with The Bachelor franchise remains in limbo, as the longtime host will sit out the summer season of Bachelor in Paradise.
00:26:39.000Instead, the role will be filled by celebrity comedians, including David Spade.
00:26:45.000I can't imagine he's never told a risque joke.
00:26:49.000Harrison has been on the sidelines and embroiled in controversy since February, when he made highly criticized comments during an interview about the controversy surrounding The Bachelor.
00:26:57.000Kirkconnell had attended an antebellum-themed fraternity party in 2018, while she was a college student.
00:27:01.000When the controversial images resurfaced on social media this year, Harrison defended Kirkconnell.
00:27:06.000And then, of course, Rachel Lindsay went after him because she knew that she could get him fired, and she knew that she could get him removed, and that she would earn all sorts of media plaudits for doing so, despite the fact that she herself has capitalized on wokeness to an extraordinary extent.
00:27:21.000She literally cut an Instagram post in the middle of the BLM protest-slash-riot in front of a Cadillac, talking about how she experiences the racial injustice of the United States by listening to Bluetooth on her Cadillac.
00:27:34.000Again, all of these cultural issues, they may not mean much, but they mean everything.
00:27:38.000They may not mean much individually, but they mean everything collectively.
00:27:41.000Because when the entire culture is designed to push a particular point of view, people will fight back against that.
00:27:46.000When the entire culture is designed to suggest that you're a bad person for believing in traditional values with regard to, for example, sexuality, people will push back against that.
00:27:53.000That is not, the people who are pushing back are pushing back.
00:27:58.000Okay, they're pushing back because you are aggressing.
00:28:02.000And when you say to people that you can't bring up your kids the way that you want to bring up your kids because it makes you a religious bigot to say to your children that you would prefer that your boy marry a girl and that your girl marry a boy.
00:28:11.000Okay, people are going to push back on that and they should push back on that because traditional values still matter.
00:28:17.000None of that means you have to be intolerant of gay and lesbian people.
00:28:20.000But that is a far cry from what the culture is pushing, which is the notion that you are in fact a bad person if you are if you are Excited about the probability of your child marrying someone of the opposite sex.
00:28:32.000You're not allowed to express a preference as to whether your child marries a person of the opposite sex and provides you natural grandchildren.
00:28:38.000You're not even allowed to mention that these days.
00:28:43.000And then this is pushed into governmental policy and structural policy.
00:28:48.000So what the left says is, okay, we're going to push super hard on the culture side.
00:28:51.000And then if you push back, this just shows that you're an intolerant bigot.
00:28:54.000Intolerant bigots shouldn't be part of the conversation.
00:28:56.000And let me tell you, there are institutions that magnify the influence of intolerant bigots.
00:29:00.000So what we really need to do is change all of those systems so we no longer have to pay attention to the intolerant bigots.
00:29:05.000This has been part of the broader argument made by people like Ronald Brownstein for years on the left, the so-called demographic argument in the United States, which is shockingly similar to the demographic argument made by the alt-right.
00:29:17.000The left has been saying since basically Barack Obama won in 2008 that there was an ascendant coalition of minorities, and the minorities would eventually be the majority.
00:29:26.000And then they would just run roughshod over this white supremacist country.
00:29:31.000This was called the Browning of America.
00:29:32.000There were pieces about it in the Atlantic.
00:29:35.000And people like me are like, that's a really racist way to think of the world.
00:29:37.000There are plenty of people who are brown who don't vote for Democrats.
00:29:43.000The alt-right, by the way, makes the same argument as the left.
00:29:45.000They say that they want to restrict immigration because only white people can be trusted with politics, which is weird because it suggests they've never been to Wellesley, an overly white place with a lot of extraordinarily liberal people.
00:29:56.000But the broader argument, which is that we need this coalition of minorities, and that if we don't win it's because people are trying to suppress the minority vote, is again part and parcel of this broader culture war that is now being pushed into the realm of governmental policy.
00:30:10.000Institutions have to be changed so that this coalition can win more often, is the case that the left is making these days.
00:30:16.000Which is why now they're pushing very hard on HR1.
00:30:21.000HR1 is being pushed because the left wants its way on everything.
00:30:24.000And if you refuse to give them their way on everything, they suggest that you are just part of this remnant of old white racists.
00:30:31.000They'll even go after members of their own party.
00:30:33.000I mean, the other day, Joe Biden pretty clearly went after Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, members of his own party.
00:30:38.000Kyrsten Sinema happens to be bisexual, by the way.
00:30:40.000He went after both of them for failing to destroy the filibuster.
00:30:43.000An institution that Joe Biden five minutes ago was talking about as the hallmark of American democracy.
00:30:47.000Now he wants to destroy the filibuster.
00:30:49.000So here is Joe Biden going after members of his own party for not wanting to destroy the system.
00:30:55.000I hear all the folks on TV saying, why doesn't Biden get this done?
00:30:59.000Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.
00:31:58.000Kyrsten Sinema is still standing up for at least the basic notion of the filibuster in the Senate.
00:32:03.000Here she was yesterday just flat out saying, no, I'm not going to kill the filibuster.
00:32:08.000I've long been a supporter of the filibuster because it is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation.
00:32:14.000Rather than allowing our country to ricochet wildly every two to four years back and forth between policies, the idea of the filibuster was created by those who came before us, the United States Senate, to create comity and to encourage senators to find bipartisanship.
00:32:31.000She's right about this, but apparently this makes her part of the right-wing majoritarian or minority control chamber.
00:33:03.000And if Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema don't bend to it, Don't bend to getting rid of the filibuster and completely federalizing election procedure in violation of the Constitution.
00:33:11.000This just means that they are part of the polarizing half of the United States.
00:33:15.000Remember when Joe Biden said at the beginning he wanted unity?
00:33:18.000And I said, unity can mean one of two things.
00:33:19.000It can mean that we try to come together around shared policy and around shared ideas, or it can mean I run roughshod over you.
00:33:25.000And I suggested that Joe Biden meant the latter.
00:33:29.000Pretty obvious which one Joe Biden meant.
00:33:31.000Alrighty, in just one second, we're gonna get to the latest on the economic news, because I have a theory that has been creeping into my head of late, that inflation is not the true danger to the American economy.
00:33:49.000Or at least it was going on until I tried Felix Grey glasses.
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00:35:41.000It goes through all of this, chapter and verse.
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00:35:52.000Because in order to understand how you reverse the progress that has been made by the radical left, you have to understand how they made that push in the first place successfully.
00:36:02.000If you're an American who knows what all of this means for our future as a free country, it's time to read up on the truth in order to stand up to the woke authoritarians.
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00:36:19.000You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
00:36:22.000So meanwhile, there's more indicators that the economy is not going swimmingly right here.
00:36:34.000Yesterday, the Dallas Federal Reserve executive, he came out and he said that the next jobs report is going to be rather odd.
00:36:40.000It's not going to be exactly what people are expecting, namely this giant jump in growth.
00:36:45.000These structural issues, which we saw in the early May report for April, supply issues, fear of infection, all those tensions, they're not actually going to go away Even for the next jobs report, we think you're going to see another maybe odd or unusual report.
00:37:08.000That odd or unusual report, will that look like a miss of 750,000 jobs, which is what happened last month?
00:37:14.000The Dallas Fed Chief, Robert Kaplan, making that comment.
00:37:16.000According to Politico, businesses say they can't find enough workers to hire.
00:37:19.000The pace of Americans moving off the unemployment rolls is slowing.
00:37:22.000And a top Federal Reserve official is warning that job trends in May might look odd.
00:37:26.000All of that suggests that the next monthly U.S.
00:37:28.000employment report, which will be released on Friday morning, may not show the robust growth that President Biden needs to help pass his sweeping agenda.
00:37:34.000On the heels of April's sluggish job growth, which shocked economic forecasters and sparked debate over a nationwide worker shortage, the May data will be closely watched for an indication of whether something significant is holding back the labor market recovery, such as what Republicans say are overly generous federal unemployment benefits, or whether the previous data was nothing more than a one-month blip.
00:37:53.000Democrats are downplaying the concerns.
00:37:54.000Maintaining the path back to full employment was always going to be winding and stacked with challenges.
00:37:58.000I don't know why it would be winding and stacked with challenges, considering it was an artificial depression, and now we have a natural recovery.
00:38:03.000Yeah, but Jen Psaki is trying to push this idea.
00:38:15.000And by the way, if you're afraid to go back to work because of COVID, after you've been vaccinated, 50% of all American adults have now been fully vaccinated.
00:38:22.000The rates of spread in this country are extraordinarily low.
00:38:26.000We are now down to below 10,000 new cases a day, which, by the way, is the metric that Anthony Fauci wants declared to be the end of the pandemic.
00:38:40.000It's that people are still afraid of COVID.
00:38:42.000Honestly, if you know people who are still walking around in deathly fear of COVID, it's because they haven't been watching anything and or they are sheep and or they are stupid.
00:38:49.000Our view is that it's going to take time for workers to regain confidence in the safety of the workplace, reestablish child care, school and commuting arrangements, and finish getting vaccinated.
00:39:01.000And even when individuals get their first dose, we've seen a huge increase in that.
00:39:06.000As I started the briefing talking about, it's about a five to six week cycle.
00:39:10.000So we have expected that to have an impact.
00:39:13.000No, you didn't expect it to have this kind of impact, which is why you were all shocked by the economic numbers that came out last month.
00:39:18.000As Hot Air points out, we still have over 12 million continuing pandemic-enhanced unemployment claims being paid, while over 7 million job openings are left unfilled.
00:39:26.000So we're paying 12 million people to stay home, there are 7 million unfilled jobs.
00:40:28.000So right now, because Joe Biden is injecting tons of money into the economy with this quote-unquote relief act, right, he is sending money out, literal checks, to people, that is gonna lead to some short-term inflation because you have more money in the system following fewer goods.
00:40:41.000You have supply chain holdups, You have people who are not able to go back to work.
00:40:45.000That means same amount of product, more demand because you're forcing money back into the system, and that's going to lead to increased prices.
00:40:52.000Now, that could lead to runaway inflation.
00:40:56.000But over the course of the past 40 years, it's been a while since we had runaway inflation in the United States.
00:40:59.000After 2007, 2008, we didn't have runaway inflation in the United States.
00:41:03.000So, David Bonson of the Bonson Group, I heard him speaking about this recently, and he had a different take that I think is worth noting here.
00:41:10.000And that take is that the big long-term threat to the United States is not, in fact, some sort of inflationary cycle like we saw in the 70s.
00:41:17.000You might get a short-term inflationary burst, like you saw in the 1970s.
00:41:20.000But his big point is that the government does not have the capacity, short of literally just continuing to send stimulus checks to people.
00:41:27.000They don't have the capacity to actually inflate.
00:41:30.000Because the real way that inflation typically is done is the Fed lowers its rate at which banks lend to one another.
00:41:37.000It lowers the overnight rate at which banks lend to one another because they have to have their balance sheets all set up for the next day.
00:41:43.000Or the Fed tries to inject money into the system by buying bonds from these banks, and then the banks have money to lend out.
00:41:50.000What happens if there's no demand for the money to lend out?
00:41:54.000Then the money doesn't get injected in the system, right?
00:41:56.000What if businesses who have already leveraged up, and by the way, businesses have leveraged up, right?
00:41:59.000Businesses that want to borrow money, because borrowing is so easy, they've already borrowed the money.
00:42:03.000Over the course of the last year, businesses have moved from like a three times leverage ratio to like a five times leverage ratio.
00:42:10.000So businesses have been leveraging up, they've been borrowing money to buy back their own stock in some cases, to grow in other cases, to maintain their share of the market or stay alive in other cases.
00:42:18.000But what happens when the demand for that money goes away?
00:42:22.000What happens when businesses have no place else to spend the money because the economy is stagnant and because the government is removing so much money from the system via taxation and regulation that there is no possibility of growth?
00:42:34.000That's when you get secular stagnation.
00:42:37.000Secular stagnation means long-term and thoroughgoing throughout the economy.
00:42:40.000This is exactly what happened in Japan.
00:42:42.000So in the 1980s, Japan was going to be the big threat.
00:42:44.000Japan was going to be the country that was going to eat our lunch economically.
00:42:49.000You had books and movies like Rising Sun.
00:43:00.000And then Japan's economy completely fell apart.
00:43:02.000And Japan tried to spur their economy through central bank spending.
00:43:06.000They tried to push lower interest rates.
00:43:08.000They tried to push money into the economy and nothing happened.
00:43:12.000Nothing happened because they had already regulated the economy too much, and because they continue to regulate the economy a lot, because they had taken a lot of money out of the economy, and because there was no real possibility of explosive growth.
00:43:23.000Businesses had no reason to take out money.
00:43:26.000Like, you're not going to take out a loan if you have no reason to take out the loan.
00:43:28.000Why would you take on debt if there's no way that you're going to repay the debt?
00:43:31.000Or, alternatively, if you're taking out the debt so that you can pay back the bank over a long period of time.
00:43:36.000So this is why when Joe Biden put out his budget proposal, which was $6 trillion, he said in the budget proposal that he was expecting about a 2% rate of growth for the next 10 years.
00:43:45.000That's a super low rate of growth, a very low rate of growth.
00:43:49.000I think the real possibility here And this is what Bonson mentions, I think this is probably right, is that we actually undershoot that.
00:43:56.000That we don't end up at a 2% rate of growth every year.
00:43:58.000That we end up at a 1.5% rate of growth every year.
00:44:25.000So right now, the big problem with overregulation, and this is true for Europe as well, if you see the stagnation of places like Sweden, the problem there wasn't Weimar Republic, we're going to have wheelbarrows full of Deutschmarks that you run around and you have to throw them at somebody for a loaf of bread.
00:44:41.000That's not what happened in Sweden when Sweden's economy stagnated.
00:44:44.000Instead, taking too much money out of the economy, taxing too much, regulating too much, making it very difficult for business to do what it could do.
00:44:51.000You can lower the interest rate as much as you want, but if businesses can't do their business, nobody's going to take that money out of the banks.
00:44:57.000You just will not be able... You're not going to be able to inflate.
00:45:01.000So the point that Bonson makes, and I think this is right, is that there is this baseline assumption that the central government of the United States is capable of superheating the economy.
00:45:09.000That they can actually generate this kind of superheated, massive growth rate, superheated economy.
00:45:13.000What we're seeing right now is actually evidence that that's not the case.
00:45:16.000What we're seeing right now is that when the government gets deeply involved and provides things like greater unemployment benefits, when the government provides free healthcare and free childcare, when it does a lot of these things, what it ends up doing, because on the other end you have to tax the hell out of people and regulate the hell out of people, is you end up removing all of the incentive structures that would make it lucrative to take out a loan from the bank.
00:45:36.000And that is a major problem for the US economy going forward.
00:45:41.000It's well worthwhile to point out that the policies followed by the Biden administration in this moment are creating short-term price shocks.
00:45:49.000Whether we are still in an inflationary cycle two years from now, I think that's rather unlikely.
00:45:53.000I think the Fed Reserve says it's rather unlikely too.
00:45:55.000It could be, but that's not what the past few decades have shown.
00:45:58.000Instead, what it's shown is that what prevents inflation is deflation.
00:46:01.000What prevents inflation is lack of demand.
00:46:03.000What prevents inflation is that the government sucks at its job.
00:46:06.000There are two ways the government can suck at its job.
00:46:08.000One is they run the printing press, and the other is they literally cannot galvanize any sort of growth, but they are still removing money from the private sector and redistributing it via the public sector in ways that inhibit the ability of the economy to grow overall.
00:46:20.000Meanwhile, just blowing out the debt over time, which will lead to austerity measures.
00:46:23.000I think that is the most likely path that we are headed for, is a secular stagnation.
00:46:26.000It looks like it's already setting in, thanks to our great and wonderful President Joe Biden and the Democratic administration.
00:46:33.000All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show coming up soon.
00:46:40.000Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
00:46:47.000This show is produced by Elliot Feld, executive producer Jeremy Boren, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.