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Jan. 28, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

59:13

The Downside Of Downside Risk | Ep. 1183

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	Wall Street gets stonked as Reddit Games the Games stop stock, San Francisco decides to crack down on schools named after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, and John Kerry is reporting for climate duty.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Alrighty, so the big news of the day is that essentially a bunch of memesters just took down half of Wall Street.
	Okay, so a couple things just to start off.
	One, It can be hilarious and also not good for society, right?
	These two things can be true at once.
	It is hilarious when your high school fellows TP your high school gym teacher's house.
	Like, that's really, really funny.
	Also, not a wonderful thing to do.
	It doesn't provide a lot of social value.
	So a lot of people today I'm seeing are cheering this.
	Oh, look, they're taking down the hedge fund bros.
	Those hedge fund bros deserve it because of what they've been doing with their short selling.
	Okay, so let me first explain what is happening.
	I'm going to give you the story.
	Then I'm going to explain exactly how all of this works.
	And I'm also going to explain what a stock market is for, because I think there is a fundamental disconnect between what people think the stock market is there to do, and therefore what people do when they trade in the stock market, and what the stock market actually accomplishes and why it provides a social good.
	The underlying theme.
	That a lot of people seem to be carrying forth today is that people who trade in the stock market, people who are day traders, hedge fund guys, the investment bankers, right?
	All those guys are bad people.
	They are bad people because they are quote-unquote speculators.
	They're not adding value to the system.
	This seems to be the idea that undergirds all of the animus that is leading people to cheer wildly for what all of these Reddit folks are now doing with regard to the GameStop stock.
	Here's what you need to keep in mind when it comes to the stock market.
	Just like any other market, people who work in a market do so to make money, but because free markets also provide social value in that transactions generally provide a value to both sides and also provide other information to the more general society.
	Okay, that is what folks in the stock market are doing.
	Every time you go to the supermarket and you buy an apple, a couple of things are happening.
	One, you're getting an apple.
	Two, the grocery store is getting the price of the apple.
	And three, you are impacting the overall price of the price of apples generally.
	Right?
	So if a lot of people rush to the apple store or to the supermarket and they all buy apples at the same time, the price of apples is going to skyrocket.
	Why?
	Because you are now conveying that there's an extraordinarily high demand for the apples and there's not enough supply for the apples.
	And that is a social good because that allows for proper reallocation of distribution.
	It means that now everybody knows we need to grow more apples.
	Now everybody knows we need to ship more apples to the grocery store.
	Pricing mechanisms are not merely just a thing that happens.
	Pricing mechanisms allow for proper reallocation of resources.
	This is true in every business ever.
	It is true at the grocery store.
	It is true at the bookstore.
	It is true at the furniture store.
	It is true everywhere.
	And it is true when it comes to the stock market as well.
	So here's what the stock market exists to do, just like the grocery store.
	It exists to allow you to buy a stock and then own stock in a particular company.
	It exists to allow companies to sell their stock so as to raise money for the things they want to do, right?
	So it provides them liquidity events.
	They can sell their stock.
	You get to own the stock, which is great.
	They get to sell their stock and they get to take your money and then invest it in growth of the company, or if they are badly run, in bonuses for the executives that are undeserved, right?
	But they get to decide that.
	And then if you don't like how they are handling that money, well then, how do you reprice that?
	Well, the way that people reprice that when a company is badly run is by doing something called short selling.
	Because again, there's a third aspect to the market.
	Just like the grocery store, there's a third aspect to the stock market.
	And that is, all of the interactions in the stock market are supposed to provide information to the general public about whether a company is being well run or poorly run.
	About what the proper pricing of the company is.
	about what the company is worth, about what others should be paying for the stock of the particular company.
	So it is not like a roulette wheel.
	It is not like a casino.
	People tend to think of the stock market like a casino because they buy a stock and then it goes up, or they buy a stock and then it goes down.
	Okay, but that does not convey the fact that there are a bunch of actual things that are happening in the stock market that are quite good for society.
	One, again, is the ability of companies to sell their stocks so they can then use that money to invest in their workers.
	And if you work for a publicly traded company, The reason that they have the money to do that is because originally somebody IPO'd and then took that money and poured it into the company.
	Okay, so that is purpose number one.
	Purpose number two is that people like you can own a 401k.
	So they can own stock in companies that they have no business running.
	You don't run Coca-Cola, but you can own stock in Coca-Cola.
	You don't own any of these publicly, you don't own Apple, but you can own stock in Apple and you can become an owner of Apple.
	That's a really cool thing.
	Okay, and then third, the stock market exists through all of these transactions.
	It exists in order to provide a proper pricing mechanism.
	Because if you just tabula rasa said, okay, how much is it going to cost me for one share of the hundred million shares of Apple stock that are out there?
	How much is it going to cost me for that?
	You have no idea.
	Really, you have no idea.
	In the same way that you really have no idea, if you walked into a store right now with no other information about planet Earth, and somebody offered you an Apple, you would have no idea what the Apple cost.
	The way that you know what the apple costs, and the way that the grocery store knows what the apple costs, is because they are competing with other competitors in the market to sell you apples, and because all of those competitors are attempting to balance out how much it costs to bring that apple to market, and more importantly, what the demand level for the apples is.
	Okay, the same thing is true of stock.
	If you say, I want a share of apple stock with no other information, you have no idea what that could be worth.
	I don't have any idea what that can be worth.
	There are people who spend every day, all day, simply analyzing What Apple is doing internally, what the demand for Apple stock is like, what the surrounding market conditions are like, and therefore you are able to, with a certain level of certitude, buy an Apple stock knowing that it is not wildly mispriced.
	Now, what the best traders will do is they will look for mispricings in the market and then they will exploit those mispricings in the market to bring themselves money.
	If they see that a stock is wildly overpriced, then what they will do is they will short sell.
	And now, that seems like predatory, right?
	Oh my god, they're short selling a stock.
	That's terrible, they're short selling a stock.
	Okay, what they are doing is they're looking to make money, they're not altruists, but what that ends up doing is conveying to the market that the stock price is too high.
	When you have a bunch of people who are short-selling a stock, that conveys to the market that the stock is overpriced and that too many people are invested in the stock.
	And so the stock price starts to re-price, it starts to revalue to the point where it's an accurate assessment of the value.
	In the same way where if you said, okay, listen, I think that six months from now, there is going to be a glut of apples on the market.
	So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to buy the right to essentially buy apples today.
	And I'm going to let me explain short selling.
	OK, in order to do this, I sort of have to explain short selling because this is what we are talking about today in terms of GameStop.
	So.
	Here's what short selling is.
	This is, again, a way of using a price mechanism in order to figure out what the true value of stocks is.
	So here's what a short seller is.
	If you want to make money off your assessment that a company is overvalued, you can participate in what is called a short sale.
	What a short sale is, is you borrow a share from somebody else, and then you sell it on the market today, and you promise the person that you borrowed that you're going to give them back the stock in a month with a little bit of interest.
	Okay, so let's say that I think that the GameStop stock is overvalued today.
	And I know that producer Mathis has a share of GameStop stock.
	So I go to Mathis and I say, listen Mathis, I'm gonna give you 10 bucks in order so that you can give me your GameStop stock.
	I want you to give it to me.
	In a month, I'm going to return you that GameStop stock with the $10.
	For essentially just lending me your stock, I am going to give you back $10 in addition to your stock.
	So Mathis goes, okay, perfect.
	Sounds great.
	Mathis is the brokerage in this particular example.
	I then take that GameStop stock.
	I look at the price of the stock.
	It's now $200.
	I sell it at $200.
	Now I have $200 in my pocket.
	And my assumption is that in a month, the GameStop stock is not going to be $200.
	It is going to be $50.
	And so now, I sell the stock at $200.
	In a month, I go back into the market, I buy a stock, and then I take that stock and I return it to Mathis.
	I spend 50 bucks on the stock a month from now.
	I'd sold it at 200 a month ago.
	Now I'd spend 50 bucks on the stock, I take it, I give it back to Mathis, I pocket the difference.
	I make 150 bucks on the pure market transaction, 140 bucks after I pay Mathis his 10 bucks back, Mathis gets back his stock.
	Now, is that me being predatory?
	Or is that me looking at the market and realizing that this stock is overpriced?
	And not only that, isn't it conveying to the market something that is true, which is that the stock is overpriced, right?
	That the stock does cost too much money, that the company is not run as well as some people are saying that the company is run.
	Okay, so that is what a short sale is.
	Okay, so what happened here is that there are a bunch of people in the hedge fund industry who looked at the company GameStop, and they said, this company's overvalued.
	We're short-selling the stock.
	We think that right now the stock for GameStop is just excessively expensive, and so we are going to short-sell, right?
	We're going to borrow a bunch of shares today, we are going to sell them on the open market, and then a month from now, we are going to buy back the GameStop stock, and then we are going to return it back to the brokerages.
	So what is now happening is that a bunch of people don't like the hedge fund managers, right?
	They don't like, they think the hedge funds...
	For both, maybe a couple good reasons and mostly bad reasons.
	There are a couple reasons why people don't like the hedge fund managers.
	One is, there's a broad overall feeling that motivated both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street back in the early 2010s.
	That feeling is, these guys bear no real risk.
	That if things go bad, somebody will step in to protect them.
	That if things go bad, if they make a bet and the bet goes wrong, the federal government is going to step in and pay them off.
	And you don't get that and I don't get that, but they get it.
	Now, I think that that is a justified rage.
	I think that that is true.
	Hey, there's something else that is happening, too.
	People are looking at the current economy, and they're looking at the stock market, and they're saying, I don't understand why a bunch of people are making money off the stock market even though the economy is in doldrums.
	And right now, they're Billion, you know, bajillion people out of work, but these hedge fund guys are just making a fortune in the stock market.
	Why are they allowed to do that?
	So some of this is just pure jealousy.
	Some of this is, why are these guys so disconnected from the real economy?
	And the answer is, they are not disconnected from the real economy.
	And if they were to bear their risk, which is what they should do, if they were to bear their risk, then they are bearing the risk that the economy will downturn.
	But the reason the stock market has remained high throughout this entire pandemic is because of the correct assumption that these stock traders are making, which is that eventually we are going to come out of the pandemic and the stocks are gonna be worth a lot more than they are today, because we have pumped money into the system, because people are gonna go back to work, because this is an artificial recession.
	Because what we are watching right now, thanks to the lockdowns and thanks to the pandemic, is an easily foreseeable artificial recession.
	And so they are pricing the future into the present value of stocks.
	Okay, so if you're just angry at the hedge fund guys because they're doing a job that actually provides some social value, but also makes them rich, Then, I don't have a lot of sympathy for you.
	If you're angry at the hedge fund guys because you believe they don't bear any downside risk and the government's gonna bail them out, the truth is, you shouldn't be angry at them as much as you should be angry at the government for bailing them out.
	The government shouldn't be bailing anybody out.
	The government should not be bailing people out when they make a bad stock pick.
	And that's true of hedge fund guys, it's true of Lehman Brothers, it's true of everybody.
	You make a bad investment in subprime mortgages, you should bear the risk of that.
	Okay, so in a second, I'm gonna explain what the GameStop Reddit guys did.
	Because again, it is both hilarious and also it cuts directly against the social value of the stock market.
	Because remember, the stock market is there for three things, to provide liquidity for companies, to allow you to invest, and three, to properly price stocks, right?
	That is what it is there to do.
	I'm gonna explain what happened with GameStop and why it undercuts a lot of the fundamental purposes of the market, even if it happens to be really, really, really funny.
	Okay, so I'm gonna get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so here's what the GameStop Reddit guys are doing, the meme makers, okay?
	And again, hilarious, also not great for the markets.
	And not great for people who invest in the markets, typically.
	So what's happening right now?
	Is there a bunch of guys who are not big institutional investors, although as we'll see, some institutional investors have jumped in on the action.
	And what they are doing is they're doing what is called a short squeeze.
	Okay, so go back to our short sale example.
	I borrow money.
	I borrow a stock from Mathis.
	I borrow a GameStop stock from Mathis with the promise that in a month I'm going to repay him $10 plus the stock.
	I then go out and I sell it at $200.
	A month from now, I sell it.
	A month from now, I buy it, another stock from GameStop for 50 bucks.
	I pocket the difference.
	Everybody with me?
	Okay, so.
	Imagine that the reverse happens.
	Imagine that I make a bad decision and I actually am wrong.
	The value of GameStop is higher than I thought it was going to be.
	So I borrow a stock from Mathis with the promise to repay him, his stock plus 10 bucks, and then I sell it at 200 bucks.
	But a month from now, the price is not $50.
	The price is $300.
	So what do I do?
	I owe Mathis a stock.
	I owe him his $10.
	But the price went up, not down.
	So now I have to come out of pocket, right?
	Now I have to actually go and buy the stock at $300.
	And I've lost $100 on the transaction.
	And after I pay Mathis his brokerage fee, I've lost $110 on the transaction because I sold the stock for $200.
	Now I have to buy back a stock at $300 and pay Mathis back $10.
	So I've lost 110 bucks on this particular transaction.
	Okay, so this is what is called a short squeeze.
	Okay, sometimes it happens sort of naturally.
	A short squeeze can also happen when people just decide they are going to jack the short sellers.
	Now, the way that you do this is you artificially boost the price of the stock, right?
	You get the price of the stock up to 300, even though the stock really should be down at 50.
	And that is what is happening right now.
	Okay, so as GameStop stock was rising precipitously, short sellers were forced to hedge their bets.
	And then they have to buy the stock in order to make up for their losses, right?
	They now have to buy the stock and they have to buy more options.
	So you get a bubble, right?
	They have to buy them because they know eventually this bubble is going to burst.
	So here's what happened.
	All of these guys on Reddit decided we are going to just F with the GameStop short sellers.
	We're gonna F with the hedge funds.
	And what we're gonna do is we are all going to buy GameStop stock all at once.
	And this led to some actual kind of stock market hilarity in the sense that GameStop is not a particularly profitable corporation.
	GameStop became one of the most expensive corporations on planet Earth.
	Like, it was worth more than Tesla.
	Okay?
	Like, that's absurd.
	It's absurd on its face.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, here's how they report this.
	The power dynamics are shifting on Wall Street.
	Individual investors are winning big, at least for now, and relishing it.
	An eye-popping rally in shares of companies that were once left for dead, including GameStop, AMC Entertainment, and BlackBerry Ltd., has upended the natural order between hedge fund investors and those trying their hand at trading from their sofas.
	While individuals are rejoicing at newfound riches, the pros are reeling from their losses.
	And so people are saying this is like a David versus Goliath sort of thing, although it's a little simplistic, as we'll explain in a moment.
	Long-held strategies, such as evaluating company fundamentals, have gone out the window in favor of momentum, right?
	This is what I was saying about this undermines the actual function of the market, which is to properly value companies.
	If you just have a bunch of people who decide today they're gonna buy stock in Blockbuster, which is exactly what's happening, right?
	Blockbuster stock is worth bupkis.
	Because Blockbuster has not been a thing for quite a while, right?
	They're not a competitive company.
	And so if you decide that you're gonna randomly drive up the price of the stock, then you're not actually doing anybody a favor except yourself.
	In fact, in certain circumstances, this is illegal.
	If you engage in what is called a pump and dump, that's clear illegality.
	So think back to the movie Wall Street.
	If you ever saw the movie Wall Street with Michael Douglas, There's a scene where Bud Fox, who's played by Charlie Sheen, you'll remember this, he is calling everybody on earth that he knows, and he's saying, and he's saying, uh, Blue, what is it?
	It's, uh, Blue Horseshoe loves Anacott Steel.
	He's saying Blue Horseshoe loves Anacott Steel.
	What he means by that is that institutional investors, they love Anacott Steel, they think Anacott Steel is really undervalued, you should all buy.
	Okay, so he pumps up the price of the stock, and he gets in early.
	So if you go to some, so let's say that now I want to pump up Anacostile, right?
	So I buy a share in Anacostile.
	Then I go to all my friends and I say, guys, let me tell you, Anacostile is a bargain.
	Okay, right now it is super duper undervalued.
	You need to buy it right now.
	I know that it's not undervalued.
	I know that actually it's properly valued.
	But instead, I lie.
	I say it's really, really undervalued.
	And so I artificially drive up the price of the stock, because now everybody wants Anacott Steel.
	And then I say, oh, well, you know what?
	Time to sell!
	Right?
	And I sell.
	So I bought Anacott Steel at a buck.
	I drove up the price all the way to a hundred bucks.
	And then I sold at a hundred bucks.
	Hey, now, what can happen right there is you can end up with these bubbles where last one out is the rotten egg.
	Right?
	Because all of my friends, if they were one of the first investors and they got in at five and now it's up to a hundred, You don't wanna be the one who is left holding the bag.
	Okay, now, if you falsely advertise this, if you say, Anaconda Steel is undervalued, that's why you should buy it, that's illegal.
	That's illegal pump and dump.
	If, however, you don't do that, and this is what the Reddit guys were doing, they weren't saying GameStop was undervalued when they did this, when they artificially drove up the price of the stock.
	They didn't say GameStop is undervalued.
	They said, we know that it is properly valued, we just want to screw with the hedge fund guys.
	So that's not illegal.
	Right, it's just a prank.
	It's a very damaging prank for those hedge fund guys because now they're caught in that short squeeze I was talking about where they have to pay back stock that they don't own.
	So they have to go into the market, they have to buy the stock.
	The need to buy the stock continues to drive the price up.
	And they're now buying stock options, right?
	They're now buying options to sell later or to buy later on.
	They're buying, they're short selling.
	They're continuing to short sell and buy into the market at the same time.
	Because they know that eventually the stock price is gonna drop again.
	I'd say now they're short selling.
	So the problem is that the longer you do this, the longer you do this, the more the bubble builds up, right?
	So the question is, can you hold the line?
	So a lot of the early investors on Reddit got out already.
	A lot of the guys on Reddit who bought the game Stop Stock, they took the ride, they sold, but somebody's gonna get left holding the bag.
	The people who typically are not gonna get left holding the bag are the institutional investors, right?
	It's gonna be the more unsophisticated players who were buying into the hold the line, we're gonna screw the hedge fund guys.
	The hedge fund guys are gonna be okay.
	They're all gonna go get revolving lines of credit.
	They're going to buy the stock that they need.
	They're going to take a loss on this particular transaction, and they'll be okay.
	It's the people who are going to buy into GameStock when it is at $300 and is actually valued at $25.
	And don't get out in time, because they were told by all their friends, hey, look, we're jacking the hedge fund guys.
	We're gonna lose money.
	Okay, so this is, again, this is what happens when you undermine the value proposition of the stock market by completely ignoring what the stock market is supposed to do, which is properly value companies.
	And all of it is based on pure animus for the hedge fund guys.
	Some of it justified, as I explained, a lot of it unjustified, and simple jealousy of the fact that there are people who make money in the stock market, and maybe you are not one of them.
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	Okay, so the Wall Street Journal says, Long-held strategies such as evaluating company fundamentals have gone out the window in favor of momentum.
	War has broken out between professionals losing billions and individual investors jeering at them on social media.
	Meanwhile, the frenzy of activity is stirring regulatory and legal concerns, as well as the attention of the Biden administration.
	Newbie investors are gathering on platforms like Reddit, Discord, Facebook, and Twitter.
	They're encouraging each other to pile into stocks, bragging about their gains, and at times, intentionally banding together to intensify losses among professional traders who protest that social media hordes are conspiring to move stock prices.
	I didn't realize it was this cult-like, said short-seller Andrew Left of Citron Research, who has become a particular target of some investors on social media.
	It's just a get-rich-quick scheme.
	GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry have received hundreds of thousands of mentions across social media since early January, have vaulted into the ranks of the most traded stocks in the U.S.
	market.
	The mammoth gains have forced money managers to dump bets that the stocks would fall, magnifying the rally.
	Right, so that means that they have to buy the stock in order to pay back the short selling they were doing.
	Bearish investors who took short positions have lost $23.6 billion this year through the close of trading Wednesday on GameStop alone, according to S3 partners, including $14.3 billion on Wednesday, when the stock price jumped 135%, that was the largest percentage increase in history, to a record of $347.51.
	to $347.51.
	On Wednesday, GameStop shares hit a high of $380, briefly giving the video game retailer a market value of 26.5 billion, more than that of Delta.
	Sorry, so.
	So...
	All of this is absurd, right?
	On its face, it's absurd.
	The question is whether this is, you know, the people who are striking back at the bad guys, or whether they're actually just sort of gaming the market for fun and giggles and to make a little bit of extra money.
	So the line that I've seen is they're just doing what the hedge fund guys are doing.
	Well, first of all, if the hedge fund guys banded together to pump end up a stock, Kind of illegal.
	So, not quite the same.
	Now, if the hedge fund guys got together and they're like, you know what?
	We're just going to tell all of our investors that the stock isn't worth what we think, what we're about to do.
	We're just going to make a gamble that we can create a momentum play, and we're going to be perfectly obvious about that.
	That's not illegal.
	Everybody is caveat emptor buyer beware.
	Okay, but the sort of enthusiasm that we're seeing for this, I think a lot of this is just a certain class-based enthusiasm, which is the hedge fund guys are jerks, and I know a lot of hedge fund guys.
	Some guys are real jerks.
	Some guys are not, just like every other industry.
	But again, there is a lot of enthusiasm for what's going on right now because it's sort of like the little guy is screwing the big guy.
	Well, some of those guys are little guys.
	Some of those guys are, in fact, not little guys, and this is worth pointing out.
	And the reality is that, according to Bloomberg, there are a bunch of institutional investors who are making bank off this sort of thing.
	It is not just little guys who are making money off of this.
	Wang Jianlin is up $773 million.
	That guy's an institutional investor, as AMC Entertainment spikes.
	Soaring shares have added $185 million worth to the CEO of Tootsie Roll's fortune.
	People have been buying up the stock of Tootsie Roll.
	Okay, so it is not merely the little guy who's making a bunch of money, and by the way, it's gonna be the little guy who gets screwed.
	Yes, there are a bunch of hedge fund billionaires who are gonna get screwed, and okay, they took a risk, and then they got jacked by a bunch of people who are basically pranking them for money, but that's, you know, risk-reward calculations don't always go right.
	It's not illegal what these folks are doing, and it can be kind of funny.
	With that said, the people who are going to get left holding the bag in the main are going to be unsophisticated, non-institutional investors who end up holding the stock too long and then ending up eating the loss, is basically what's going to end up happening here.
	Wang, the founder of closely held conglomerate, Adelian Wanda Group, now owns a stake worth about $1 billion in AMC, which climbs almost 20 bucks in New York trading the most since October of 2018.
	And so there are a lot of people who are big players who are making a lot of money off of this.
	Okay, but again, the underlying idea here is that the stock market is kind of bad, or that hedge fund guys are doing something deeply immoral and they short sell.
	I don't buy either of those things.
	I think there are people who do immoral things in every market.
	I think that is true in virtually every market, but it is worth noting hedge fund guys are generally competing against one another.
	If they think that somebody is undervaluing a stock, then they will go after those people.
	These folks are sharks.
	The hedge fund guys are sharks.
	Okay, so here is CNBC guest Chamath Palihapiatya.
	I'm screwing up his name.
	Chamath Palihapiatya.
	He's the social capital CEO, and he was going off on CNBC saying that, you know, anybody who's upset about this in the Wall Street world is basically just crapping on the little guy.
	Well, no, I think that what the little guy is doing here is perfectly legal.
	I don't think that it is particularly good for the broader social implications of the market, right?
	It just reinforces the idea that the market is a casino, which the market is not and should not be.
	But here he is defending what is going on with GameStop right now.
	I'm not saying they shouldn't be able to participate.
	You want to say, you're saying they should participate on your terms, on Wall Street's terms, in a way where they get the, when Wall Street can have the best of it, they can maybe participate on the side, but then when Wall Street gets the worst of it, they, their parents, their relatives, will just come and bail them out.
	So if you want to fix it, I think you've got to go and ask for the same transparency, because you can't all of a sudden have your cake and eat it too.
	Let's have hedge funds operate in the shadows, but let's then basically land-bast Wall Street bets because they actually have the courage to write their stuff down publicly where anybody can see it.
	Okay, so his call is for the hedge fund guys to be transparent about why they are investing the way they're investing.
	And honestly, I don't think that that's a bad idea.
	I think that's totally fine.
	But I will note that typically the market is not, I mean, this is a perfect example of a stock just being wildly overpriced, and they're now doing it stock by stock.
	They're just going to every stock that is being short sold because these stocks are overvalued, because the companies are not doing well, and they're now pumping those up and then dumping them.
	I mean, that's essentially what they are doing.
	Okay, so the response is also bad, because everything is bad.
	So the response has been to ban the Reddit WallStreetBets server for at least a little while.
	Discord banned the Reddit WallStreetBets server.
	The company confirmed to The Verge.
	Reddit's WallStreetBets subreddit is the driver of an unprecedented rally of GameStop stock and has received a great deal of attention in the press as the stock continues to soar.
	Now, Discord says it didn't ban the server for financial fraud.
	Instead, it was banned because it continued to allow, quote, hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.
	Yeah, that's bullcrap.
	That is not true.
	Okay, so what happened here is that all these companies, these hedge funds, and the government probably, went to Discord and said, these people are manipulating stock prices.
	I want you to take it down.
	Even though it's not technically illegal, okay?
	So this actually looks a lot more like what the government and what the media and what institutional players have been doing with social media, right?
	Where they say, we don't like a particular point of view.
	We know that it's not illegal, but we want you to take it down.
	It's sort of like what all of these major institutional government players said to Amazon Web Services to have them take down Parler.
	That's what this sort of looks like, right?
	Is we don't like the WallStreetBets subreddit.
	So take it down because it's doing us damage.
	And then pretend that it's on the basis of hateful content.
	That's nonsense.
	It's not true.
	Okay, because how about the timing?
	Was there not hateful content a week ago?
	Or two weeks ago?
	I'm sure there was.
	And so the timing is that people got upset, and then they're like, okay, we're gonna ban this thing.
	Now that is a real violation of rights.
	Okay, I don't have to love what the Wall Street Bets guys are doing right now.
	Again, I don't.
	I think that they are undercutting one of the fundamental tenets of the market, which is that you are attempting to properly price stock.
	With that said, I think taking down the ability of people to talk about stock in ways that you don't like is deeply violative of basic First Amendment concepts.
	That's a private company.
	Again, it can do it.
	But a First Amendment culture does not go along with this sort of thing, and it just demonstrates where the institutions of power truly lie.
	Which is not with the people.
	It is not with individuals.
	And that merely reinforces the feeling that the hedge fund guys have disproportionate influence over what is happening in our financial world.
	It's a really, really bad move to take down the subreddit.
	That should not be a thing that happens.
	It really shouldn't.
	Now, with that said, if you are cheering this on mainly because you don't like hedge fund guys and because they have slick back hair and because they're rich and drive fancy cars, let me suggest to you that you actually have to find the bad thing that they have done in order to dislike them.
	Otherwise, it's just pure jealousy.
	If they're taking bailouts, that is a reason to dislike them.
	If they are actively engaging in misinformation campaigns directed at companies, that is a reason to dislike them.
	If they are gaming the market, that's a reason to dislike them.
	If they are just engaging in short-selling because they believe that a company is overvalued, and if their competitors are doing the same, that's not doing something wrong.
	I don't think that the Reddit guys are, I think the Reddit guys, the only thing they're doing wrong here is that I think that the motivations here are pretty much revenge and an open acknowledgement that they are not really interested in providing any service to the market other than a sort of pump and dump, me and my friends are gonna get rich and the Wall Street bros are gonna pay.
	Again, can be hilarious, just like your high school teacher getting TP'd.
	But that does not mean that it is providing a giant social service, or that we should all be cheering on this sort of thing as a matter of routine because the stock market is bad.
	Like really, what's the alternative?
	The alternative is that we have people who are wildly overvaluing stock, who are simply playing the pump and dump game.
	And then, Why would anybody trade in the stock market?
	Right?
	Then it deprives people of liquidity.
	It deprives people of solidity in their 401ks.
	There are real consequences to treating the stock market like a casino.
	The dirty secret of the stock market is that it is not a casino.
	Okay?
	And that most people who are engaged in the stock market, including institutional investors, are not playing it like a casino.
	I know that the popular view of the stock market, once again, is that it is a casino, and that there are winners, and there are losers, and it's just people betting.
	That is not what it is.
	It is a market.
	It is called the market, just like your grocery store, just like your bookstore, just like any other market, and just because people get disproportionately rich off of that does not mean that they're not providing an ancillary social value.
	They are, in fact.
	This does not provide ancillary social value, what is happening right now.
	It doesn't.
	It provides hilarity.
	So if hilarity is an ancillary social value, it is really funny you have people who are now controlling the stock market who are posting memes of Aragorn telling people to hold the line.
	Like that's kind of funny.
	You basically have a bunch of jokesters who are now controlling wide swaths of the economy.
	It's funny until it's not funny.
	It's funny until it comes time for you to invest your actual salary in the stock market, and you look around and go, can I even buy into Apple knowing that these people could jack the stock tomorrow?
	Like, just for the bleeps and giggles of it?
	Probably, it's not good precedent.
	So all the people who are cheering today, again, if you want to direct your ire against the government, please do it.
	I'm with you.
	None of the people on Wall Street should currently be bailed out.
	Even though they're getting jacked right now, they should not be bailed out.
	The government should not be intervening right now.
	The government should never have intervened with regard to bailing out the stock market.
	But that's ire that should be directed at the government, which is answerable to you.
	The sort of punishment of private industry for engaging in what it is they do is, I think, a bad precedent.
	And I know this is an unpopular view, but again, if you believe that a stock market should exist and that it provides social value, then you have to explain why what's going on today is providing consummate social value.
	Okay, now, in a second, we're going to get to the continuation of the destruction of public education in the United States.
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	Okay, in just a second, we'll get to the continuation of the undermining of American education and also to Joe Biden and company who are We're now sounding off on the GameStop situation.
	And their response is just as stupid and hilarious as you would expect it would be.
	We'll get to that in a moment.
	First, DailyWire, we are fighting in the culture.
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	So quick note, final sort of referendum on the GameStop thing.
	So today on Twitter, Eat the Rich is trending.
	It's pretty obvious what exactly a lot of this GameStop stuff is about and the sort of populists on both sides sharing it because they don't like the stock market generally.
	It's a weird take and I'm wondering exactly how you are adding social value.
	Again, this is very foolish.
	And again, the solution is not going to be the government.
	Naturally, the Biden administration has the best possible response.
	So Jen Psaki, the brand new and not very good White House press secretary for the Biden administration, was asked about GameStop.
	Her response was one of the dumbest responses I've ever heard to a thing.
	Here she was.
	She was asked, remember, the question was, what do you guys think about the GameStop thing?
	And what are you going to do about the fact that people are artificially boosting the prices of particular stocks in order to pump and dump them effectively?
	What are you going to do about that?
	And here was Jen Psaki's answer.
	Is the White House concerned about the stock market activity we're seeing around GameStop, and now with some other stocks as well, including the subsidiary, or whatever, the company that was Blockbuster?
	And have there been any conversations with the SEC about how to proceed?
	Well, I'm also happy to repeat that we have the first female Treasury Secretary and a team that's surrounding her, and often questions about market we'll send to them.
	Oh, well, I mean, now that we know that the Treasury Secretary has a vagina, I guess that that solves all the problems.
	Well done there.
	Remember, the question was, what are you gonna do about the GameStop thing?
	She's like, well, our Treasury Secretary is biologically a woman.
	Well, I guess problem solved then, gang.
	Geniuses in charge.
	This is why the government actually should not get involved.
	Let it play out, let it play out.
	People are gonna learn their lesson when they hold onto the stock too long, and the only people who got rich were the Reddit people who were manipulating the market at the very beginning.
	Right, when the blue horseshoe buying anaconda steel guys at the very beginning.
	Those are the ones who end up making all the money.
	Okay, meanwhile, our education system is just in tatters.
	Okay, let's just be real about this.
	Our public education system sucks.
	It is not good.
	The latest indicator that our public education system sucks is on Tuesday night, the San Francisco School Board voted to accept the recommendations of a renaming committee.
	This is according to Emily Zanotti at Daily Wire.
	They voted to officially rename 44 public schools in San Francisco bearing the names of controversial historical figures.
	These figures include Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Paul Revere, Thomas Edison, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was once the mayor of San Francisco.
	San Francisco commissioned the renaming committee in October of 2019.
	They announced they were putting in the committee's name change recommendations to a vote in December, and they kept claiming, oh, you know, it's just a recommendation.
	We're not going to do anything.
	Well, Then they did it.
	Then they did it.
	So what is the big problem with Feinstein?
	So according to a 1984 copy of Worker's Vanguard, quote-unquote, Dixie Feinstein raised a Confederate flag at San Francisco's Civic Center while she was mayor of the city and later replaced the flag after it was pulled down by protesters.
	But it turns out that that was part of a historical flags display.
	And it wasn't clear that Feinstein had anything to do with it.
	It doesn't matter.
	Her name comes off to high schools.
	Abraham Lincoln ran afoul of the committee because, quote, he did not demonstrate that black lives mattered to him.
	That's a hot take there, San Francisco.
	Abraham Lincoln, you know, the man who was shot to death in a theater after ending the Civil War and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation?
	He didn't believe that Black Lives Matter.
	Solid take there, San Francisco.
	Really well done.
	Really, what they should have just gone with is that he was a homophobe.
	And here's the thing, you could use that for, like, everyone, including Barack Obama, up to, like, 2011.
	It's good.
	We should just rename all of the schools, every single school, In favor, we need to find the wokest person and that person all the schools will be named after.
	I'm talking about we need like a one quarter black, one quarter Native American, one quarter South American, one quarter Chinese, Little person, transgender, pansexual.
	That's what we need.
	We'll find that person and that person we'll name all of the high schools after.
	We don't know who that is yet, but could be you.
	Could be your lucky day if you are that person.
	If I just described you, please send your application in to the San Francisco School Board.
	According to the San Francisco Chronicle, many San Francisco parents, as well as Mayor London Breed, argued the effort was ill-timed given the pandemic.
	Oh yeah, it's just the bad timing.
	That's the problem.
	By the way, the move is going to cost San Francisco's school district millions of bucks, because they actually have to go through and rename all of this.
	But what does money matter in schooling, after all?
	I mean, one thing that we definitely know When it comes to schooling, it's the teachers' unions who rule the roost.
	Over in Chicago, they've got disaster on the mind.
	Chicago Public Schools has now directed parents to keep their students home again on Thursday because the Chicago Teachers' Union is moving closer to a strike.
	By the way, that's illegal, as far as I'm aware.
	CPS said in an email to parents on Wednesday evening, quote, Chicago Teachers' Union leadership continues to direct their members who support pre-K and cluster programs to remain at home Therefore, we must ask parents to continue keeping your children home, as we are unable to guarantee adequate staffing levels to cover in-person learning.
	The district will continue with remote learning tomorrow, on January 28th.
	So, good news, they're just going to keep these teachers out forever.
	The teachers have decided that they don't want to work anymore.
	And yes, that makes you selfish.
	It does.
	If you decide that you want to take public pay and not work, and you are 20 years old and at very little risk of COVID, and it turns out that you're teaching kindergartners who aren't transmitting it, that makes you a bad person.
	It does.
	Hate to break it to you, and just because you're a teacher, if you're not teaching, you're no longer a teacher.
	If you're not doing the job of teaching, I cannot call you a teacher at this point.
	I can just call you a leech off the public taxpayer dollar.
	Unless you are somebody who is supremely vulnerable to COVID, Again, if you're a young dance teacher who is not going in to dance away the hours of first graders because of COVID, you're just lying.
	It is not about your risk.
	It is about the fact that you prefer to stay home and watch old episodes on HGTV.
	That's all that's going on right now.
	It's absurd, and it has nothing to do with the good of students, obviously.
	It is anti-science, naturally.
	The Biden administration is doing nothing about it, nor are they even sounding off about it.
	And you're going to start to see a parents' uprising here.
	If Democrats don't create some gap between them and these god-awful teachers unions, parents are going to start saying, you know what?
	I'm not going to vote for the party that's in hot to these folks.
	Here, for example, is a frustrated Virginia parent saying that school board cowards were not reopening our schools.
	They're hiding behind children, but they're not doing this for the kids.
	They're doing this for themselves.
	You're a bunch of cowards hiding behind our children as an excuse for keeping schools closed.
	You think you're some sort of martyrs because of the decisions you're making when the statistics do not lie that the vast majority of the population is not at risk from this virus.
	The garbage workers who pick up my freaking trash risk their lives every day more than anyone in this school system!
	Hey, fact check true.
	Fact check true.
	Okay, meanwhile, The focus in the Biden administration is on the most important things, not opening the schools, not really even COVID stimulus, right?
	What they're really, really focused in laser-like is climate change, because 100 years from now, the water level's gonna be higher.
	So that's really important, important stuff.
	And they're willing to sacrifice jobs in the right here and the right now, in the middle of a pandemic, with the jobs market, in the toilet, they're willing to sacrifice jobs.
	So Biden's energy secretary nominee actually admitted this yesterday.
	This would be the Honorable Jennifer Granholm.
	Right?
	And she said, Oh yeah, you know what?
	We may have to, by the way, terrible governor of Michigan.
	She said, you know what?
	We may have to sacrifice some jobs.
	That's okay.
	I mean, that'll be fine.
	Here she goes.
	I think the president's plan of building back better, which would create more jobs in energy, clean energy, than the jobs that might be sacrificed.
	But I will say this, no job, we don't want to see any jobs sacrificed.
	For those states that have these jobs in abundance, this is something we're going to have to work on together to ensure that people remain employed.
	Oh, okay, well, you know, they're going to, they'll lose their jobs.
	But, you know, some jobs may have to be sacrificed.
	And then later, the jobs will come back around through green jobs.
	Ah, the dream of the ages, green jobs.
	You'll remember that Van Jones was Barack Obama's green jobs are.
	Here's a grand total number of the number of green jobs that Van Jones provided.
	Big old zero, zero.
	So yeah, I'm sure all the people who are losing their jobs in the here and now are very comforted by the fact that the measures being taken by the Biden administration to lower carbon emissions will result over the course of the next century in a minute, minute degree change to the future climate.
	By the way, if we abided by the entire Paris Agreement in the here and now, the amount of climate change that we would avert in the United States, Just by the U.S.
	abiding by it?
	It's like 0.1 degrees Celsius over the course of the next century.
	Sounds like a fantastic deal for people who are gonna lose their jobs right now and become government dependents.
	Sounds awesome.
	You know who is very blithe about this though?
	Is the new climate czar.
	Is the climate czar John Kerry!
	So, you'll remember John Kerry from such things as, I ran for president in 2004 and got shellacked by George W. Bush, and I was a garbage Secretary of State during the Obama administration.
	Now, he is back and starring in his greatest role, elitist, sneering at people who didn't marry wealthy.
	This is his best role.
	So, here is John Kerry yesterday.
	He said, you know, if you lose your job in the gas industry, maybe you can marry a ketchup heiress.
	Yes!
	There's John Kerry.
	You know, you look at the consequences of black lung for a minor, for instance, and measure that against the fastest growing job in the United States before COVID was solar power technician.
	The same people can do those jobs.
	But the choice of doing the solar power one now is a better choice.
	So what President Biden wants to do is make sure those folks have better choices, that they have alternatives, that they can be the people who go to work to make the solar panels.
	They were making them here at home.
	Well, not all of us can be windsurfing heiress-marriers, John Kerry.
	Truly, amazing, amazing stuff.
	Okay, so let's talk a little bit about John Kerry.
	So as I say, John Kerry.
	There, right there, is a dude who loves him some John Kerry.
	That dude is wealthy because he married rich.
	So John Kerry married a catch-up heiress, he married into the Heinz fortune.
	And then, he sits around and does nothing for a living.
	Right, he is just a quote-unquote public servant.
	He's worth a bajillion dollars.
	He owns a private jet, by the way.
	He still owns a private jet.
	While he's telling oil and gas workers you guys are gonna be out of work?
	Maybe you can learn to weld solar panels because, you know, oil and gas, solar panels, the same.
	All the same.
	Okay, that is not how jobs work.
	The idea that you can take a 55-year-old dude who has been working in pipeline manufacturing and simply shift him over to making solar panels, which, by the way, are still some of the most overpriced garbage in the American energy market.
	And then you're going to somehow create jobs?
	Oh, well, we've given them more choice, like a choice to be unemployed and then to have a job they don't know how to do.
	That's fine.
	I mean, all right.
	This is basically John Kerry just being warned.
	Here's Herman Munster explaining that, you know, if they lose their jobs, it's not a big deal.
	And by the way, if they do lose their jobs, it's not because of us.
	It's not because we are attempting to crack down on fracking or gas and oil exploration.
	No, it's other market forces.
	We're behind this.
	We're not.
	No.
	There has never been a person more consistently wrong across the scope of his entire life than John Kerry.
	His record is unblemished.
	Unblemished at sucking at his job.
	He comes back from Vietnam, he promptly slanders all the troops in Vietnam as human rights violators, on the order of John Druskell.
	Then he runs for Senate, he ends up in the Senate.
	He spends the next several decades sucking at everything.
	Then he ends up running in 2004 as the anti-war candidate.
	He's against the surge.
	Then he becomes Secretary of State where he promptly explains that no peace deal will get done in the Middle East unless Israel is forced into concessions to the Iranians and the Palestinians.
	That was a lie.
	And now he's back!
	The beautiful thing about government is you always fail up.
	You always fail up.
	So here he was explaining, you know, if people lose their jobs, that's not my fault.
	Those sounds emerging from his face, which is really, really looking like a mudslide in the Hollywood Hills at this point.
	I think that unfortunately, workers have been fed a false narrative.
	No surprise, right?
	For the last few years, they've been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate is coming at their expense.
	No, it's not.
	What's happening to them is happening because of other market forces already taking place.
	And what the financiers, the big banks, the asset managers, private investors, venture capital are all discovering is there's a lot of money to be made in the creation of these new jobs in these sectors.
	Okay, no.
	What all those guys are doing is that you want to talk about corruption on Wall Street?
	That's corruption on Wall Street.
	You want to talk about why the hedge fund guys and the venture capitalists are all investing in green energy?
	Because they know that you, John Kerry, and this silly administration are going to be dumping buttloads of money into the green energy boondoggle that is.
	These energy sources are not nearly as efficient as carbon.
	That is just the reality of the world.
	The vast majority of emissions are not coming from the United States.
	90% of all global carbon emissions are coming from outside the United States.
	The United States has been lowering its carbon emissions year on year, mostly thanks to fracking.
	Okay, but again, you want to talk about market manipulation?
	The government incentivizing people to spend money on stuff that actually is not marketable is definitely market manipulation.
	But good news, this is where the laser-like focus of the Biden administration is going to be.
	On equity, meaning that we are going to look at group outcome and pervert the notion of individual justice.
	And climate change, so we can use the threat of deep impact, or the day after tomorrow, in order to essentially restructure the entire world economy.
	Really, really solid stuff.
	My favorite is that John Kerry is just delusional.
	All he does at this point is he just does PR for foreign regimes.
	So while he was Secretary of State, he was PR agent for Iran.
	He was going around being like, Iran, they're nice people.
	Yes!
	They told us that they would be nice now, and sure, they can use that money for terrorism, but I like them.
	I'm friends with them.
	You should be too.
	So now, Kerry's like, you know who's great?
	China!
	China's amazing!
	They signed the Paris Accords!
	Talk to us, Herman.
	China was not adverse to working on this with the Obama administration.
	China was very key to helping to get the Paris Agreement to come together because the United States and China came together, worked together, put together an opportunity to have a working task force, and then we announced our reductions And that gave great momentum to the movement of Europe.
	Okay, and then China, they're gonna help.
	In 2018, China's carbon emissions were on track to grow at the fastest rate in six years.
	So yeah, we should definitely trust China.
	China definitely is not a competitor on the world stage, and they definitely won't take advantage of us hampering our own economy in order to just blow out their carbon emissions and take advantage of the vacuum created by our weaker markets.
	No way, no way.
	They're good people.
	John Kerry is so, so wrong.
	John Kerry also says that Joe Biden is going to make climate change central to his foreign policy planning.
	Oh, goody, goody gumdrops.
	Today, in the order that he will sign that Gina has described to you, he makes Climate central to foreign policy planning, to diplomacy, and to national security preparedness.
	It creates new platforms to coordinate climate action across the federal agencies and departments sorely needed.
	And most importantly, it commissions a national intelligence estimate on the security implications of climate change to give all of us an even deeper understanding of the challenge.
	This is the first time a president has ever done that.
	It's amazing.
	We're going to try and spec out security implications of a warmer climate.
	It's going to be super accurate.
	We're great at this.
	You are not great at this.
	Meanwhile, the White House climate advisor says that climate is Gina McCarthy, the national climate advisor.
	She says that climate change is the most significant public health challenge of our time.
	OK, here she is.
	This order takes historic strides to address environmental injustice.
	It creates both a White House interagency task force to address environmental justice as well as an advisory council.
	It directs the Department of Health and Human Services to create an Office of Climate Change and Health Equity because, after all, climate change is the most significant public health challenge of our time.
	Okay, now I feel like I need some dry ramen and just a picture of a COVID virus.
	That's what I'm gonna need right now.
	Right?
	Okay, so maybe our guys can animate this in.
	Dry ramen.
	COVID virus.
	Behind it.
	Okay, like, greatest public health challenge of our time.
	Hmm.
	Is it climate change?
	Meaning the gradual warming of the climate over the next century, most of which is already baked into the cake.
	Or is it the virus that is going to kill half a million Americans over the course of a year?
	Which one?
	Hmm.
	Let's think.
	I can't think of any other public health challenges that are on the order of the climate slightly warming year on year over the course of time.
	I can't think of any.
	It's amazing.
	I'm so glad that we are structuring our entire government, our entire executive branch of government, around the lie that America is systemically racist and that what we ought to be pursuing is equal group outcome, and the equally stupid lie that climate change is the greatest challenge facing the United States.
	It is not the greatest challenge facing the United States.
	It is a problem that can be dealt with.
	By adaptation over the course of time, the solutions that are currently being proposed by the Biden administration are garbage.
	They do not make any sense.
	People who study this issue generally believe that they don't make a lot of sense unless you have a global carbon tax, which is not something that is ever going to happen.
	You are not going to radically curb carbon emissions globally.
	And the idea that you can just invest in green energy and this is going to somehow make the innovation better, that if you just dump money into investments in green energy, that this is somehow going to create massively new and wonderful variations on energy production.
	I'm wondering what the evidence is for that, because we've now dumped billions and billions of dollars into that.
	I'm not seeing tremendous return on a lot of this stuff.
	There's a real agenda here, okay?
	The agenda is twofold.
	One is, There are a bunch of climate change true sort of religious believers who intend on killing the fossil fuel industry utterly.
	This is like Michael Mann, right?
	So Michael Mann is a scientist, most famous for the so-called hockey stick grab, very controversial.
	So Michael Mann, he says, the goal here is we have to stop the fossil fuel industry dead.
	Now, if Biden had openly campaigned on that, we're stopping fossil fuels, like stopping it dead.
	Which is what so much of his administration would like.
	Would have been a problem for him in Pennsylvania.
	But here is Michael Mann proposing just that.
	Of course we should all do those things that we can do in our everyday lives to decrease our environmental footprint.
	What we can't allow is for polluting interests, fossil fuel companies, and those promoting their agenda to somehow convince us that that alone is enough.
	Because then that takes the pressure off of the need for systemic change, for policies Like those that Biden is outlining in his plan to accelerate, again, that transition away from our reliance on fossil fuels.
	Okay, if you have any magical ideas on how we are going to transition the entire globe away from fossil fuels by creating an alternative energy source that is even remotely, remotely as efficient as this, love to hear them, especially from you guys in the back who keep saying that you don't want nuclear energy or fracking.
	Really interested to hear how windmills are gonna solve all of our problems.
	I'm gonna put a windmill on my car.
	Probably the best solution.
	By the way, he knows that it's a lie, that if you reduce your environmental footprint, you, personally, reduce your environmental footprint, he knows that that's a lie, that that's gonna change the climate.
	It ain't.
	You digging a well in your backyard ain't gonna do a damn thing.
	It's not.
	He knows it.
	You know it.
	John Kerry knows it.
	They all know it.
	Okay, so there's another agenda here, too, and that is the broader left-wing agenda, which is we are going to reorganize the entire American economy.
	So you may have noticed that this is always the conclusion of every statement.
	Climate change is a grave threat to the United States.
	Therefore, let us reorganize the entire American economy.
	Also, racial inequity, a grave threat to America.
	Solution, let's change over the entire American economy and remold it and remake it.
	You know what I noticed?
	I noticed that COVID is a really bad thing.
	What if we just remade the entire American economy on the back of that?
	It seems like you have a goal and everything that is bad in life is then used as a means in order for you to gain that goal.
	That is what it seems like.
	So forgive me when I don't trust that you are being straight with the American people on this sort of stuff, members of the Biden administration, because I don't think you are.
	I've been in rooms with the John Kerry wing of the Democratic Party, and behind closed doors, they acknowledge that everything that I'm saying right now is true.
	That the vast majority of climate change is baked into the cake.
	That it is largely too late for large-scale mitigation.
	that adaptation is the proper solution, and that if you are going to actually take measures that are effective, they have to be directed toward developing technologies to, for example, suck climate out of the air or geoengineering, right?
	There's all sorts of stuff that you could do, right?
	Building seawalls, there's stuff you could do, but they don't wanna do that.
	What they actually wanna do is remake the entire American economy in a more socialistic mold, and this is just the lever of power by which they think they're gonna be able to do it.
	So if they scare the crap out of you and they keep citing Greta Thunberg saying that the world is on fire and all of that kind of stuff, then maybe you will allow them to completely remold the American economy in the image that they always wanted to remold it into.
	Yeah, the answer on that one is no.
	The new ruling class does not get to do that simply because they are lying to you about the nature of the climate change threat.
	Again, not saying climate change isn't a problem over the course of the next century.
	It is.
	Is it a problem that is going to end all human life?
	No.
	Is it an existential threat to humanity?
	No.
	Is it something that we are going to be able to deal with as the world innately grows more and more prosperous, which is what's going to happen over the course of the next century, not according to me, according to William Nordhaus, who just won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on climate change?
	That's what's going to happen.
	Can we deal with it?
	Yes.
	Are we gonna deal with it with any of these ham-handed, stupid ideas for remolding individual freedom?
	Nope.
	You're just gonna reap the whirlwind.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
	In the meantime, go check out The Michael Moll Show.
	Michael is talking about the media blaming Trump and quote-unquote white supremacy with what is happening with GameStop stock right now.
	That episode is available right this moment.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	Copyright 2021.
	Internet trolls bankrupt hedge funds for the LOLs, John Kerry tells fossil fuel workers to learn solar, and most Republicans support Trump in 2024.

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