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May 13, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

48:52

Bidinflation | Ep. 1256

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	President Biden's policies blow up prices, panic buying hits the southeast as the gas runs out, and Liz Cheney's firefight with the GOP is everything the media could hope for.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
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	Alrighty, so the federal government is now admitting that inflation has set in.
	According to CNBC.com, inflation in April accelerated at its fastest pace in more than 12 years.
	As the U.S.
	economic recovery kicked into gear and energy prices jumped higher, the Labor Department reported on Wednesday, the Consumer Price Index, which measures a basket of goods as well as energy and housing costs, rose 4.2 percent from a year earlier.
	A Dow Jones survey had expected a 3.6% increase.
	This is actually even higher.
	The month-to-month gain was 0.8% against the expected 0.2% excluding volatile food and energy prices.
	Core CPI increased 3% from the same period in 2020 and 0.9% on a monthly basis.
	So all you have to do to get to that Slightly less alarming number is exclude the two biggest costs that people generally take on, food and energy.
	The respective estimates were now 2.3% and 0.3%.
	The increase in the annual headline CPI rate was the fastest since September of 2008.
	Well, the monthly gain in core inflation was the largest since 1981.
	Okay, so this is the largest core inflation that we've had, month over month, in 40 years.
	And we're supposed to be like, okay with this, apparently.
	Energy prices overall jumped 25% from a year earlier, including a 49.6% increase for gasoline and 37.3% for fuel oil.
	That came even though most energy categories saw a decline in April.
	Prices at the pump, which fell 1.4% in April, have resumed their climb in May, with the national average eclipsing $3 a gallon.
	And remember, this was All before the Colonial Pipeline shutdown.
	Okay, so that massive increase in energy costs was before the Colonial Pipeline shutdown.
	Used car and truck prices, which are seen as a key inflation indicator because, frankly, the prices generally stay pretty stable with used cars and trucks.
	Instead, they surged 21%, including a 10% increase in April alone.
	Shelter, another key CPI component, was up 2.1% year-over-year and 0.4% for the month.
	In addition to rising prices, one of the main reasons for the big annual gain was because of base effects, meaning inflation was pretty low in 2020 because of the shutdown of the U.S.
	economy.
	But if you look at the chart, what you see is this radical increase over the last couple of months.
	Not a steady increase, this radical increase over the last couple of months in the inflation rate.
	And this is accompanied by the fact that federal taxes, spending, and the deficit all set records through the first seven months of fiscal 2021.
	Federal tax revenues have hit a record $2.1 trillion for the period.
	Federal spending climbed to $4 trillion just for the last seven months, resulting in a federal deficit of nearly $2 trillion over the last seven months alone.
	While the historical October through April tax revenues are adjusted for inflation into April 2021 dollars, the second highest tax revenues of the October through April period came in fiscal 2018.
	That year, the Treasury collected $2.1 trillion in total tax revenues in the first seven months.
	When you actually adjust those numbers, the October through April spending numbers, into April 2021 dollars, the second highest spending during that period came in fiscal 2020.
	So we are just blowing out the spending, we are blowing out the taxation, and we are blowing out the deficit.
	Meanwhile, Joe Biden has no idea what the hell is going on.
	You know, it's funny.
	When the Biden administration came into office, the media not only celebrated because Trump was out, but they said, competence is back.
	These people are so unbelievably competent.
	No, they're not.
	No, they're not.
	Okay, the great lie of American politics is that American politics resembles House of Cards.
	There's a bunch of very clever people in Washington, D.C.
	who are manipulating the system, who have plans.
	These plans pan out.
	Wrong.
	Okay, all of American politics is like Veep or In the Loop.
	All of American politics is a bunch of morons running around at top speed, crashing into each other to the Benny Hill music.
	That's all politics is.
	Okay, just like in your own business, how many really smart people are there in your business?
	The answer is like seven.
	Okay, how many really smart people are there in American politics?
	Like seven, out of millions.
	Okay, and they are never at the top of the American government.
	The American government is filled with dullards.
	And not only dullards, incompetents.
	And incompetents who have been boosted in their incompetence for literally their entire lives.
	I mean, Joe Biden has not spent a moment outside of elected office, except for when he was in VP for like five minutes, since he was 30 years old.
	Okay, which means that he has been on the taxpayer dole.
	He is significantly less useful as a person than many people who are on welfare for that period of time.
	He's on taxpayer dollars too, and he's been useless that entire time.
	When he's not reversing himself or pushing bad policy, he just is running around incompetently flailing.
	Okay, so that's what he was doing yesterday.
	We've got inflation that is starting to kick in.
	It is purely due to the fact that he's blowing money into the U.S.
	economy at record rates.
	We did this last year.
	We did it.
	Thanks to a pandemic.
	Now we don't have a pandemic anymore.
	The pandemic is coming to an end.
	Everyone except for the CDC acknowledges this and knows this.
	And yet he is still trying to usher in a period in which you spend $10 trillion.
	He's proposed not only the $4 trillion budget, but three separate $2 trillion bills on top of that.
	How do you think we are going to pay for that?
	He says, we're going to do it through increased taxation.
	We're not going to do it through increased taxation.
	All of his tax measurements are taken over the course of 15 years and all the spending is done over the course of eight years.
	That's not how any of this works.
	If you are going to measure tax revenues against the spending, you have to take the same period of time.
	That's like saying, well, you know, I'm really not blowing out the deficit because in the next six months, I'm going to spend a million dollars.
	But you know, in the next five years, I'm probably going to make a million dollars.
	Yes, but there's that intervening period between six months and five years where you're going to continue spending money.
	None of that makes any sense.
	It's not going to be through tax money.
	It's going to be through financing via the Federal Reserve.
	OK, all that is happening right now is that the United States is blowing out the deficit and the Federal Reserve is blowing credit into the system.
	We have maintained a zero percent interest rate despite the fact that we are now in a growth period.
	We are superheating the American economy, we are superheating the American dollar, and we are inflating prices.
	That's all that is happening right now.
	And we are creating an artificial scarcity of labor.
	We are paying people to stay home.
	So Joe Biden, this incompetent boob, yesterday he was asked about inflation, and he just ignored it.
	I mean, I don't know whether he heard it.
	There's not much going on upstairs anymore for Joe Biden.
	There never was all that much going on upstairs for Joe Biden, but even Joe Biden of 2021 is not the same as Joe Biden of 2015, for example.
	And again, in 2015, Joe Biden was no Great Shakes.
	I mean, Barack Obama thought that Joe Biden was a dullard.
	What are the rest of us supposed to think?
	Here's Joe Biden.
	Anyway, thank you guys.
	Should Americans be worried about inflation, sir?
	Bye.
	Thanks.
	Gotta go.
	See you later.
	Even some of the moderate Senate Democrats are beginning to look askance at the Democratic program here.
	But not Joe Biden.
	Not members of his administration.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so.
	Even Democrats are now looking askance at Joe Biden's big spending plans.
	According to Politico, Senate Democrats are signaling they are unlikely to extend a $300 federal weekly unemployment benefit past September, especially if the economy continues to recover.
	Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said at a Tuesday press conference there was overwhelming support among Democrats to keep providing the additional money to existing unemployment insurance.
	But not every member of his caucus is on board, particularly after last week's weaker-than-expected April jobs report.
	Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, is already making it clear he will not support extending the benefits past September 6th.
	He said, I'll never vote for another extension as long as I know that with the vaccines, there's not an excuse for no one to be vaccinated. I understand there's millions of jobs in America we can't fill right now. We need people back to work. There's more and more people understanding they are in trouble. Manchin had previously expressed hesitation over the benefit.
	In a vote earlier this year, he backed only extending the added money until mid-July, but then he voted for the so-called American Rescue Plan, which was just blowing money into the economy for no reason.
	Now, Manchin is far from alone in his concerns.
	Senate Republicans won't support another extension.
	I would expect that Kyrsten Sinema would be not particularly warm toward another unemployment extension.
	Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, of course, is a radical leftist and chair of the Senate Finance Committee.
	He said there had been report after report indicating it wasn't accurate that the benefits discouraged work.
	Oh, weird, because actually, when you pay people to stay home, they stay home.
	I mean, I know it's a giant shock to folks, but when you pay people to stay at home, they stay at home.
	Meanwhile, there are other Democrats who are a little bit skeptical.
	It's not just Manchin.
	Several Senate Democrats said they were taking a wait-and-see strategy on the issues, adding they would need to assess the economic situation this summer and noting potential regional differences.
	So that would include people like Angus King in Maine or Jon Tester in Montana.
	Hey, notice that this runs very much counter to the new democratic agenda point of universal basic income.
	If you felt that paying people to stay home didn't discourage work, then you would be on board for permanent extension of increased unemployment benefits.
	You are not, because the reality is we don't have the money for this, and you are artificially decreasing the supply curve.
	And when you do that, you're artificially increasing the price of goods.
	And even Democrats in the media are starting to realize that austerity may be on the table.
	Noah Smith, who writes for Bloomberg Opinion and is certainly no right-winger, he is now pointing out that there are a lot of people who are worrying about overheating of the economy.
	Warren Buffett recently called the economy red-hot, said he's seeing higher prices.
	Some wealth managers are starting to tell clients inflation is on the way.
	Some economists like Larry Summers and Mohamed El-Erian are giving the exact same warning.
	Again, all of this is what happens when you artificially decrease the labor supply and artificially increase the monetary supply.
	And now, the Fed could start reining this thing in.
	But they have no interest in reining this thing in.
	Janet Yellen has made clear that her priorities are not keeping inflation low and keeping unemployment low.
	Those were supposedly the priorities of the Federal Reserve.
	Now she's the head of the U.S.
	Treasury.
	She says equity is the priority.
	So long as there are certain groups in America that are less employed than other groups in America, she's just going to keep blowing money into the system.
	It well turns out that the easiest way that you reach equality of outcome is by depressing everyone.
	It is much harder to make everyone succeed at the same level than to depress everybody to the same level.
	And that is precisely what is happening.
	Meanwhile, this utterly incompetent administration has no answers with regard to the colonial pipeline debacle.
	According to the Washington Post, a sudden fuel shortage worsened across the eastern half of the United States on Wednesday after a cyber attack crippled a major pipeline as long lines, sharp boards, and pumps gone dry greeted unhappy drivers from the Alabama foothills to the Chesapeake Bay.
	I know in Florida, there are a lot of gas stations that have been running out of gas.
	People have been driving gas station to gas station trying to find gas.
	People across the southeast and now up into the northeast have been waiting in fuel lines very reminiscent of the 1970s.
	There's a ridiculous There's a ridiculous video of a woman attempting to take plastic bags and fill them with gasoline, which prompted the transportation department to tweet out, please don't fill plastic bags with gasoline.
	It's like, come on, man, this is America.
	We can fill whatever we want with gasoline.
	But although government and industry officials said the nation had plenty of fuel and the pipeline was set to resume operations in the evening, Nervous drivers clogged gas stations and created shortages in parts or all of 11 states.
	At least 12,000 gas stations reported being completely empty.
	The squeeze pushed the price of a gallon past $3, its highest in years.
	Now, the Colonial Pipeline hack isn't Biden's fault.
	Colonial Pipeline's a private company.
	Sure, our cyber defenses need to be better.
	But you can't really blame Biden for that.
	What you can blame Biden for is that his basic policy has been anti-gas and oil since before he took office.
	He's been pressing forward with this Green New Deal nonsense.
	Which substitutes significantly inferior forms of energy in terms of efficiency for things like gas and oil.
	And yesterday, you had Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm openly stating that, you know, this shortage of oil might not be a bad thing because maybe people will buy Teslas.
	Yeah, it turns out not everybody can afford a Tesla.
	It turns out that electric cars are very, very expensive, especially decent ones.
	Hey, meanwhile, Joe Biden, for some odd reason, again, he is just not with us.
	Joe Biden is untethered from reality.
	Yesterday, he was asked about these gas lines, and Joe Biden started rambling nonsensically about how we need to spend more on education.
	The wires got crossed or something.
	Like this, this person is, he's the president of the United States and we are told he's uber competent.
	He's not even competent.
	I mean, I wonder if he is legally competent.
	Forget about like competent to be president of the United States.
	I wonder if he is legally competent at this point.
	He has lost it.
	He didn't have much to begin.
	He has lost it.
	Here he is.
	What does education have to do with the colonial pipeline problems?
	I think what this shows is that I think we have to make a greater investment And education as it relates to being able to train and graduate more people proficient in cyber security.
	That's your takeaway?
	I mean, I will give him credit.
	He's able to swivel everything to let's spend more money.
	So somehow, he's going to connect the hack on the grid, on the pipeline here.
	He's going to connect that in some odd way with we're not spending enough money on cyber security education.
	It's a take.
	It's a take that makes no sense, but That's the president of the United States, man.
	Meanwhile, Pete Buttigieg, the greatest of all transportation secretaries, a very important person who is excellent at transportation because the dude loves choo-choo trains.
	He talks all the time about how much choo-choo trains are, you know, they make him happy.
	He likes when they go choo-choo, particularly.
	He loves the choo-choo train.
	He also loves airports.
	Airports are great and romantic.
	This is what he said in his opening speech, that he's in love with transportation because he likes things that go.
	They have wheels and stuff.
	They're cool.
	Shoot your trains in airports, for our transportation secretary who couldn't fill potholes in South Bend, but is now the transportation secretary for no reason anyone can discern.
	Because he built Icetown.
	He's Ben Wyatt from Parks and Recreation, this guy.
	And they made him Transportation Secretary.
	It's unreal.
	Of course we understand the concern in the areas where people are encountering temporary supply disruptions.
	But hoarding does not make things better.
	And under no circumstances should gasoline ever be put into anything but a vehicle directly or an approved container.
	You can see even Pete Buttigieg is sort of embarrassed by the fact that he has to say this sort of stuff.
	Okay, first of all, when he says hoarding is not good for anybody, well, it's kind of good for the person who has the gas when nobody else has the gas.
	I mean, to be fair, hoarding isn't bad for that person.
	And meanwhile, what is the alternative that's being proposed by the Biden administration?
	They have so many wonderful alternatives to oil and natural gas.
	Like, for example, solar panels, right?
	Solar panels have been proposed as a solution to our energy crisis.
	There was John Kerr!
	Yeah, we love solar panels.
	Solar panels are great.
	Also, they're being made with Uyghur slave labor in China.
	That's unfortunate.
	Xinjiang province not only produces some of the solar panels that we believe are being in some cases produced in forced labor by Uyghurs, but also there are a significant amount of rare earth mineral that's used in the solar panels themselves.
	It is my understanding that the Biden administration is right now in the process of assessing Whether or not that will be the target of sanctions.
	Okay, but we need the solar panels.
	So, you know, sure, the solar panels we love are made by forced labor in China, but you know, you know, man, this administration, they're just a bleep show.
	They really are.
	Like from top to bottom, the incompetence is extraordinary.
	So here's the thing about the Trump administration.
	The messaging was incompetent.
	The policy was not incompetent.
	You know how you could tell?
	In a booming economy all the way up until COVID, you had zero foreign policy crises, During the entirety of the Trump administration.
	Like, think of a serious foreign policy crisis during the Trump administration.
	There really wasn't one.
	In the first hundred days, you have massive inflation under Joe Biden.
	You have a Middle East that is blowing up, thanks specifically to Joe Biden's policy.
	You have unemployment that is setting in in the middle of what should be an easy, natural economic recovery.
	And you have tremendous vaccine hesitancy because these morons can't trench out their information about the vaccine properly.
	Okay, the amazing thing about all of this, which I'll get into in just one second, the most amazing thing about all of this, truthfully, is that this administration, their policies, they are completely dependent, completely dependent on the old coots who can't speak three sentences.
	I'll explain in just one second.
	It really is.
	I mean, I've called him President Houseplant before because he is just a barely alive thing hiding the water stain.
	They are so dependent on Joe Biden.
	It's incredible.
	It's incredible.
	I mean, people are pretending that Joe Biden, that he's kind of an irrelevant figure.
	He's not an irrelevant figure.
	He is the most relevant figure in the sense that were he to go a way tomorrow, were he to retire, were he to step down, God forbid something were to happen to him, the Democratic Party would be in such significant and immediate trouble.
	Everyone inside the Democratic Party knows this.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, let us talk about the fact that you don't wanna be spending your time at an auto parts store like now or ever.
	Why would you wanna wait in line, you finally get to the front of the line, and then they search for the part that you need and then they order it online and they upcharge you.
	Or you could just go directly to the source, rockauto.com.
	It's much easier than walking into a store and someone's demanding quick answers to specific questions like whether your Odyssey is an LX or an EX.
	Instead, just go to rockauto.com.
	It's at your desk.
	It's in your pocket.
	Rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices possible, rather than changing prices based on what the market will bear, like airlines do.
	Why would you spend up to twice as much for the same parts?
	Like, say, for example, this is off the top of my head.
	I'm totally not reading this.
	You need a Delphi FG1456 fuel pump assembly for a 2005 to 2010 Honda Odyssey.
	Just right off the top of my head.
	Like, I know it costs $354 at a big chain store.
	That is the kind of thing you could get at Rock Auto for $217.
	RockAuto.com is a family business.
	They've been serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
	Go check them out right now.
	Go to RockAuto.com.
	See all the parts available for your car or truck.
	Write Shapiro in there.
	How did you hear about us box?
	So they know that we sent you.
	Go to RockAuto.com right now.
	See all the parts available for your car or truck.
	And again, let them know that we sent you by writing Shapiro in there.
	How did you hear about us box?
	Okay, so this administration It's policy is so bad and it's all dependent on the continued aliveness of Joe Biden.
	The barely aliveness of Joe Biden.
	That is that.
	That's it.
	OK, so Joe Biden again.
	He's, it's amazing.
	They're, it's weekend to Bernie's.
	They're just wheeling him around on a gurney.
	And he says a couple of things, then they wheel him off slowly.
	It's the weirdest, it's the weirdest presidency.
	I mean, you thought the Trump presidency was weird, just on a raw level, because Donald Trump was a reality TV star who tweeted like whatever random crap came into his brain.
	He had Twitter loggeria.
	I'm not sure that this is not significantly weirder because Joe Biden, every time he speaks, it's like the door to the Crypt Keeper opens like, Oh, I don't know.
	Click.
	And then they just wheel him off.
	So weird, man.
	Here was Joe Biden yesterday openly saying, I'm not supposed to be answering questions.
	No, you are.
	You're the president of the United States.
	You're supposed to be answering questions.
	Thank you.
	You guys are bad.
	I'm not supposed to be answering all these questions.
	I'm supposed to leave, but I can't resist your questions.
	What?
	You guys are bad?
	I'm not supposed to be answering?
	You're very naughty.
	Naughty asking journalists.
	I'm supposed to leave.
	And, well, come on.
	What is going on?
	What's going on?
	He completely forgets where he is in the middle of sentences.
	Yesterday, he was talking about meeting with the House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy.
	You probably should know his name.
	He's the House Minority Leader.
	Here is the president of the United States completely forgetting Kevin McCarthy's name.
	I'm encouraged not just because of a solid meeting with with the Republican leader in the House and with with Mitch or He does this all the time.
	You remember, he forgot the name of his own defense secretary.
	He is not with us.
	Can you know why he's important, gang?
	Because you know who's waiting in the wings?
	Yes, we all know.
	Kamala Harris.
	You know that laugh.
	You know that music.
	That's the Undertaker's music.
	Kamala Harris is waiting in the wings.
	Here is the problem.
	Americans do not like Kamala Harris at all.
	Joe Biden is at least above 50% in the approval ratings.
	There's a brand new poll from YouGov.
	Here's what it finds.
	Among all U.S.
	adults, she has a 41% favorable rating and a 48% unfavorable rating, including a 57% unfavorable rating among independents.
	They are completely dependent on this old coot remaining barely sentient in order to ram through this garbage agenda.
	It's absolutely unbelievable.
	It's unbelievable.
	Okay, meanwhile, you can see how the media are swiveling away from this.
	So, you have the Middle East in flames.
	You have massive inflation.
	You have an economy that is in the doldrums, even though we should be in the greatest period of economic growth of our lifetimes.
	I mean, bar none.
	We were expecting that GDP growth this quarter was gonna be just astounding.
	And instead, we got job growth that was three quarters of a million jobs under what it was supposed to be this month.
	All of that is happening.
	They're pushing for radical social policy that shifts the nature of the deal between individual Americans and the federal government.
	They're invading religious freedom rights.
	They're invading the ability of corporations to operate as they want to with regard to free markets.
	This administration is a bleep show.
	And the consequences are obvious to everyone.
	And so they are deeply reliant on Joe Biden.
	So the media, they're not basically, they just are the PR wing of the Democratic Party.
	That's all they are.
	The establishment media, understand, there is no distinction whatsoever between the DNC press office and the actual press.
	There's no distinction.
	They are the same.
	The same people occupy the same positions, which is why they move so smoothly from one to the other.
	You'll see people working for the New York Times, and then suddenly they just pop up, boom, right there in the Biden administration.
	You see it on CNN all the time.
	It's not rare.
	Okay, so they've decided that they are going to misdirect away from the chaos that has been engulfing pretty much everywhere.
	And they're going to misdirect toward this Liz Cheney story.
	Now, as I've been saying, does anyone know who the number three House Minority Party leader was like five years ago?
	Can you name the person?
	Having trouble, are you?
	Yeah, because no one cares.
	Who cares who the number three is in the House Minority Party?
	You're not even talking about the House Majority Party.
	You're talking about the House Minority Party.
	But Liz Cheney is getting all sorts of press because yesterday, Liz Cheney was voted out of her position as the number three.
	Not the number two and not the number one.
	She was voted out as the number three in the House Minority Party, specifically because the Republicans in the House were getting frustrated with the fact that Liz Cheney seemed to have a peculiar predilection for the strange new respect offered by the media.
	Two months ago, they voted on whether Liz Cheney should stay.
	She had exactly the same position on January 6th then, that she does now.
	She had exactly the same position on Donald Trump then, that she does now.
	She had exactly the same position on the veracity of the 2020 election then, as she does now.
	But she withstood the vote and did so pretty easily.
	With the support, by the way, of Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader.
	Then what happened?
	She decided, you know, it'd be a great idea.
	I'm going to go into the media and pretty much every day I'm just only going to talk about how Trump sucks and how Republicans who supported Trump kind of suck and how the 2020 election is legit and January 6th is the worst thing that ever happened and all of this.
	Now, when you're the house minority leader, when you're the house number three, I should say, you have a couple of jobs, okay?
	And those jobs are sometimes in conflict.
	Your job as a congressperson is to vote on issues.
	Liz Cheney, when she votes, is quite good.
	She voted like 94% of the time, by the way, with Donald Trump when Trump was president.
	So, she actually had a better record of voting with Trump than the new House No.
	3, who is the kind of aspiring House No.
	3, Elise Stefanik from New York.
	Cheney is much more conservative in voting record than Stefanik, bar none.
	But, it's not just about your voting record.
	It's about can you raise money for the party, and do you help orient the communications of the party toward taking down the opposing party?
	Or, are you directing all of your fire internally?
	Are you spending all of your time giving MSNBC and CNN and The Washington Post and The New York Times exactly what they want?
	Now, there is a difference between how you message and what you message.
	I have said many times on the show that I agree with Liz Cheney's basic take on January 6th.
	I agree with her basic take on how the election of 2020 went.
	I don't think it was decided by voter fraud and irregularity.
	I think that if there was rigging, it was by the media, which lied consistently for years.
	I think that Trump's behavior between the election and January 6th was pretty egregious.
	I talked about it openly at the time.
	I talk about it openly now.
	I agree with all those things.
	But let's be real about this.
	The threat to the country is not coming from a president who has not been in office for four months, is banned from Twitter and Facebook, and has been relegated to starting a blog and then blasting out emails about how much he hates Liz Cheney.
	These kind of bizarre emails.
	Okay, that guy is not the deep threat to the country.
	The threat to the country is an authoritarian left that has taken over every major institution in American life, is on the move at the top of the American government, is creating inflation, unemployment, and chaos in the Middle East.
	That is the threat.
	Why is Liz Cheney not talking about that?
	Okay, that is the specific reason why she was ousted.
	Again, she held the same positions that she does now two months ago, and she survived the vote.
	Then she decided, I'm going to use the intervening eight weeks to do nothing but crap on Republicans.
	And Republicans, predictably, were like, you know what?
	We don't need you in House leadership.
	That's not a thing that we require.
	We can have any other Republican who's a better fundraiser than you and doesn't spend all their days trying to give Joe Scarborough all sorts of fever dreams.
	Try not to do that if you're in House leadership.
	Okay, so Cheney has been doing this thing where she basically has made herself hero of the republic, strange new respect recipient from the left.
	And she has done so by suggesting that the reason that she's being ousted from House leadership is not because of her lack of what we would call in Hebrew, seichel, or lack of common sense.
	The reason she's being ousted from House leadership is because specifically she took this position.
	Well, it's a combo, right?
	She did take a position that is fairly unpopular with the Republican base, but she could survive that.
	She could.
	She absolutely could survive that position.
	If she did not make her top priority, the consistent weird take that the great threat to the country is a president who is no longer in office and is not widely influential via his blog, okay?
	Like, there are greater threats to the country right now, you may have noticed.
	But Liz Cheney has decided that she kind of went into this thing without an exit strategy.
	She decided she was going to start this fight and she really didn't know how to get out of it.
	So the only way to get out of it is to keep on doubling down.
	So here she was yesterday talking about how today's vote shows where the GOP is.
	No, what today's vote shows, or yesterday's vote showed, is that the GOP does not wish to spend all waking moments talking about a guy who's not in office.
	That if they ignore whatever silly things Trump is saying in his emails and focus in on, you know, the crises facing the country, they'll win back the house.
	But you, Liz Cheney, have spent every waking moment, apparently, dealing with Trump.
	I don't understand why, and no one else does either.
	But this is exactly what the media want.
	What the media want, they know the only way the Democrats are able to retain the House in 2022 is by labeling the Republicans too crazy to be elected.
	Right?
	To say that the Republicans, they're the party of Trump.
	Now, that's a real bank shot because Trump ain't gonna have been in office for a couple of years by 2022.
	But that's really their only hope because their own record sucks.
	The entire media is looking for this too because they would much rather cover Liz Cheney versus Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans than cover the fact that a doddering old president who doesn't know what the hell is going on is presiding over a bizarrely timed collapse on nearly every front.
	So here's Liz Cheney giving the media exactly what they want.
	I do not.
	I think that it is an indication of where the Republican Party is.
	And I think that the party is in a place that we've got to bring it back from.
	And we've got to get back to a position where we are a party that can fight for conservative principles, that can fight for substance.
	We cannot be dragged backward by the very dangerous lies of a former president.
	OK, I have a question.
	Who is dragging us backward?
	Who's talking about this the most?
	Who decides that it's important to answer every single question the media asks you about this sort of stuff and spend 90% of your time on it?
	There are two ways that you're dragged backwards here.
	Okay, one, she's correct.
	You shouldn't go around suggesting that Trump's prevarications are not prevarications.
	They were.
	You shouldn't go around suggesting that Biden and the president.
	Biden's the president.
	Okay, but there's another way you're dragged backwards and that is relitigating this thing over and over and over as though it makes a damn bit of difference.
	Well, that's what Liz Cheney's been spending every day doing.
	Kevin McCarthy yesterday, he was specifically asked about this.
	He said, listen, we're not questioning who the president is.
	We just met with him five seconds ago.
	The conference will decide, but I don't think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election.
	I think that is all over with.
	We're sitting here with the president today.
	So from that point of view, I don't think that's a problem.
	Okay, meanwhile, Cheney is receiving exactly what you would expect, a strange new respect to the media.
	You think that Liz Cheney at House No.
	3 would be being interviewed by Savannah Guthrie on national TV if this weren't happening?
	The media are all over this because they don't want to cover the actual news.
	Okay, this is not a big news story.
	I'm sorry.
	An internal House battle is not a big news story.
	It's certainly not a bigger news story than the fact that the entire House infrastructure for the Democrats last year refused to condemn Ilhan Omar for open anti-Semitism, so she just keeps being an anti-Semite.
	But the media didn't cover that either in the same way.
	This is blanket wall-to-wall kind of stuff because they need Trump.
	Trump is a distraction.
	Trump is the shiny object.
	Trump is the misdirection.
	And Liz Cheney will substitute for Trump because she, by dint of what she's talking about, makes Trump the issue.
	So here is Liz Cheney with Savannah Guthrie.
	Again, is this something that a House GOP number three should be doing?
	Interviews with MSNBC's Savannah Guthrie on the Today show about how terrible the other Republicans are?
	Do you think Leader McCarthy has placed his own ambitions to be Speaker of the House above principle?
	I think that he is not leading with principle right now.
	And I think that it is, it's sad and I think it's dangerous.
	And I think that we are at a moment where the Republican Party has to have leaders that are focused on principle.
	I mean, I'm sorry.
	Which principles are you talking about?
	Because it turns out that there are several different principles at play.
	One is focusing on the principle that we don't lie about elections.
	Agree.
	Then there's the principle of stop the people in power from wrecking the country.
	Are you doing that?
	Really?
	That's kind of a priority.
	Hey, I think it's a pretty good indicator that you might be headed down the wrong path here when Jen Psaki from the White House is praising you.
	It's disturbing to see any leader, regardless of party, being attacked for simply speaking the truth.
	And as the president said last week, it's hard to understand.
	But our belief, his belief, is that the American people will have to make their own decisions about whether the reaction by the people they elected to represent them should be embracing and elevating conspiracies and attacks on our democracy, or whether it should be standing up for ideals that have historically been owned by both Democrats and Republicans representing the country.
	I'm sorry, being lectured about election veracity by the same Democrats who claim for four years that Trump was a Russian cat's paw, and suggest that Al Gore was president, and suggest that Diebold machines decided the 2004 election, and who keep elevating Stacey Abrams, who still refuses to acknowledge that she was not legitimately elected the governor of Georgia.
	Like, spare me.
	Spare me just a little bit.
	How much do the media love this story?
	The reason that Liz Cheney ain't in leadership is because the media love this story so much.
	How much do the media love this story?
	According to the folks over at Newsbusters, Curtis Hoek reporting, CNN spent nearly three times more time on Liz Cheney in 12 hours than all of the economic crises that are hitting the country right now.
	Very, very clear what exactly the agenda here is.
	Okay, in just a second, we'll bring you the latest from the situation in Israel.
	The rockets continue to fall and rain down on Israeli cities.
	Riots are now plaguing Israeli cities as well.
	And the American and international left have decided the good guys are Hamas.
	We'll get to this in one second.
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	Alrighty, in just a second, we'll get to the latest in the Middle East.
	First, if Americans love anything, it is their freedom.
	And it feels like there are some powerful forces trying to take it from you.
	Well, that's because they are.
	Small businesses are dying in the name of public safety, and kids are being indoctrinated in schools.
	And we're being conditioned to fear retribution for questioning the accepted narrative.
	We all feel this, right?
	If you're working for a company right now, you're afraid that your bosses are going to fire you if you voted for Trump.
	If you are going to school, you're afraid that if you say something that doesn't toe the leftist line, your professor is going to nail you, right?
	You are worried about this because we are living in an authoritarian moment, which is coincidentally the name of my new book.
	The book is called The Authoritarian Moment.
	It goes through, institution by institution, how the left re-normalized every institution.
	Because you have to understand that in order to fight back.
	Because that's really what the book is about.
	How we re-normalize, make normal again, these institutions.
	If you're interested in fighting back against the authoritarian left, which is the movement that is on the march right now, if you want to protect yourself, your loved ones from mob rule, and from the thought leaders who have decided to implement their authoritarian agenda from above, go check out my book today, The Authoritarian Moment.
	It's available for pre-order right now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, any other major bookseller already soaring up the bestseller charts even a couple of months in advance.
	Go check it out right now, The Authoritarian Moment.
	You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	Meanwhile, the rockets continue to fall in Israel.
	Hundreds more rockets fired at Tel Aviv and Eilat.
	Hamas has also been launching what they call suicide drones.
	According to the Jerusalem Post, Hamas launched suicide drones laden with explosives into Israel on Thursday.
	At least one was believed to have exploded in the air somewhere in central Israel.
	The drone attack came.
	As over a hundred long-range rockets were fired in the direction of Tel Aviv, central Israel, and as far south as Eilat.
	Eilat is the very southern tip of Israel.
	Four people were injured.
	The rocket attack came as the Israeli Defense Forces prepared for a possible ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.
	Plans for a ground offensive are scheduled to be presented to the IDF Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Aviv Kohavi, for approval later on Thursday.
	This, of course, makes perfect sense because the Gaza and Hamas party has been firing, the terrorist group, they've been firing these missiles directly from civilian areas.
	Israel could theoretically bomb all these places into submission.
	They have complete air superiority.
	They're not doing so specifically because they attempted to avoid civilian casualties, which of course is why Hamas tends to hide all of its weaponry in mosques, schools, apartment buildings, and populated areas.
	They're firing all of their ordnance directly from areas where they can use human shields.
	Meanwhile, after a large barrage of rockets towards central and southern Israel on Thursday afternoon, Abu Ubaidah, spokesman of Hamas's military wing, the Izz Ad-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, claimed Hamas was launching rockets toward Ramon Airport.
	After the barrage, the Hevel Eilat Regional Council, located in southern Negev, announced a rocket had fallen in the regional council.
	No injuries were reported.
	Meanwhile, the IDF has been destroying government targets in the Gaza Strip, such as central banks and internal security buildings.
	They've also killed some of the Hamas top leaders.
	Remember, all of this was initiated because Mahmoud Abbas canceled an election in the Palestinian Authority, and then blamed the Jews, fomented violence, and then Hamas got in on the act, and now Israel is knocking out a bunch of Hamas leaders.
	Meanwhile, world leaders are calling Mahmoud Abbas, the guy who started this whole routine.
	It's pretty incredible.
	The inside-outside game that is played by Palestinian terrorist groups continues to amaze.
	The left's willingness to cover for actual honest-to-God terrorist groups is astonishing to me.
	It really is an amazing thing.
	Hamas makes no bones about the fact that they wish to wipe out every Jew.
	This is not a conflict over land.
	This is not a conflict over borders.
	This is not a... You have one group that wishes to kill everyone of a particular group, and one group that wishes to live.
	They are being very inconvenient in that they are not willingly dying.
	There have been times in the past where Jews were quite soft in their own defense.
	It didn't end well for them.
	That's never going to happen again.
	That's why the State of Israel exists, and people are angry that the State of Israel exists.
	And so you have to come up with all sorts of bizarre justifications for why Israel is not right to defend itself here.
	Fortunately, we have Congress people, sitting Congress people, who are full on in on this sort of stuff.
	So, for example, you have Alexander Ocasio-Cortez openly defending Hamas.
	Right, this genius.
	So Joe Biden said that Israel has a right to defend itself, which, by the way, isn't it kind of amazing that you have to actually say that?
	Israel, which is a sovereign country, has the right to defend itself?
	What would the converse be?
	It doesn't have the right to defend itself?
	Of course it has the right to defend itself.
	You know what would happen if there were a terrorist group or, say, the government of Mexico, which is actually what is going on.
	Hamas is the government of the Gaza Strip.
	What if the government of Mexico were firing hundreds of rockets into San Diego?
	Do you know how long that government would last?
	Zero days.
	We would be planting the American flag in Mexico City immediately.
	Okay, this notion that Israel is supposed to sit around and bear this sort of stuff is insane.
	So Biden says, Israel has a right to defend itself, which is like the mildest form of, okay, Israel can kill a few Hamas leaders.
	Alexander Ocasio-Cortez then tweets out, blanket statements like these.
	Blanket statements?
	What state doesn't have the right to defend itself?
	Blanket statements like these with little context or acknowledgement of what precipitated this cycle of violence, namely the expulsions of Palestinians and attacks on Al-Aqsa, dehumanized Palestinians, and implied the U.S.
	will look the other way at human rights violations.
	It's wrong.
	So it's wrong for her, for the Jewish state to defend itself.
	He's saying that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself from ongoing, consistent rocket attacks directed at civilians?
	Okay, there's a point where being anti-Israel shifts over into being anti-Semitic.
	Okay, and at the point where you're saying that the Jewish state doesn't have the same rights as any other state on planet Earth, you have reached this point.
	Okay, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez tweeted out, by only stepping in to name Hamas's actions, which are condemnable, when refusing to acknowledge the rights of Palestinians, Biden reinforces the false idea that Palestinians instigated this cycle of violence.
	Of course they instigated this cycle of violence.
	Are you insane?
	Who's firing the rockets?
	Who started the riots at Al-Aqsa.
	Okay, that is a lie to say that the Israelis started the riots at Al-Aqsa.
	It is not true.
	It is an overt lie.
	She says, this is not neutral language.
	It takes aside the side of occupation.
	She's an ignoramus and she's a fool.
	Okay, and that is perfectly clear.
	But so, but you know.
	I will attribute ignorance to her.
	I will attribute malice to Rashida Tlaib.
	So Rashida Tlaib is just a malicious pro-terror liar.
	So here is Rashida Tlaib at a rally yesterday promoting the leftist idea, the international leftist idea, that the subjugated of the world are all in solidarity with one another and that the true story of humanity is white people.
	All over, and she counts Jews with whites.
	White people all over who are subjugating brown people all over.
	This is something that Jamal Bowman, who's standing right next to Rashida Tlaib when she says this, also is putting out there.
	It's the reason why Black Lives Matter has in its manifesto, in its program, end the Israeli occupation.
	Because there's a lie that is out there, going all the way back to Frantz Fanon, that basically anybody who has a European way of life is an oppressor, and anybody else is not an oppressor, they are the victimized.
	And so the oppressors of the world have to rise up in anti-colonialist fashion, right?
	That's what this language is.
	So here's Rashida Tlaib suggesting that what the Israelis are, quote unquote, doing to the Palestinians is what the police do to black and brown people.
	I assume that's what she means by they, because if she doesn't mean the police by they, if she doesn't mean two separate terms by they, as you will see, then she's just talking about the Jews.
	And that's just pure anti-Semitism.
	So here's Rashida Tlaib suggesting somehow a connection between police treatment of black and brown people in the United States, which, again, she lies about, to Israeli treatment of Palestinians.
	So there are a few things that are wrong with this.
	One, the police in the United States are not systemically racist.
	Put that aside.
	Number two, the Israelis are not white.
	Okay, this bizarre notion that the Israelis are white ignores the fact that like half of Israelis, more than half of Israelis, by percentage, are from Arabic countries.
	The Jews who have been killed in Israel, there are some from Yemen, there are some from Morocco.
	There are plenty of Jews who are not white.
	Okay, and Jews, technically speaking, were not white until like the last five minutes when they became prominent in American politics.
	Until then, they were considered an out-group.
	Okay, but here's Rashida Tlaib pushing this vile nonsense, this vile racially polarizing nonsense.
	And by the way, pro-Hamas nonsense, because she has nary a word to say about Hamas firing rockets indiscriminately into civilian population centers and using human shields in order to protect themselves.
	Our freedom is interconnected with black, brown, indigenous.
	It is connected.
	What they are doing to the Palestinian people is what they continue to do to our people.
	By the way, it is.
	and sisters here to the immigrant community we love.
	And I know, so I want you to know this.
	If you are marching for freedom or full esteem, please know that you must be marching for everybody's freedom.
	And it's all interconnected.
	It's all interconnected, you see.
	This is how you grow this movement.
	By the way, it is.
	For the truth.
	For the left.
	You wonder about the red, what people have termed the red green alliance, meaning the sort of communist, you know, red, red Islamist alliance.
	The answer is they're aimed at tearing down American institutions, tearing down Western Israel is seen as an extension of that.
	They don't hate America because they hate Israel.
	They hate Israel because they hate America.
	I mean, the basic notion that Rashida Tlaib is connecting the institutions of the United States with what's going on in Israel, in order to conflate all of that, you have to acknowledge that what she's really attempting to do is condemn all of the systems of the West Because there is some supposed underclass that is being repressed by these systems.
	And so she'll make excuses for any level of violence in the same way that members of the Radical Democratic Party make excuses for people burning down cities and murdering people.
	In the United States, they make excuses for Hamas firing rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas.
	Now again, this is all anti-factual.
	Soumya Santosh is a 32-year-old Indian woman who, in order to care for her 9-year-old boy, found work in Ashkelon caring for an 80-year-old woman.
	And she was blown up by Hamas, like yesterday.
	19-year-old Yehuda Guetta, from Libya, was shot and killed earlier this week by a Palestinian-American named Montaser Shalabi, who was motivated, according to his neighbors, by equal parts Jew hatred and heavy gambling deaths.
	According to Tablet Mag, the basic attempt to conflate American racial politics with the Middle East is not only intellectually dishonest, but has terrible motivations.
	And this is, by the way, why you are seeing Jews getting beat up in different places in the United States.
	Yesterday in Florida, there was a truck that was driving around Jewish rallies saying Hitler was right.
	Okay, the conflation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
	Not everybody who doesn't like Israel is an anti-Semite, but every anti-Semite is anti-Israel.
	Okay, so it's pretty incredible to see these narratives trotted out.
	Perhaps the dumbest narrative, of course, is the narrative trotted out by Trevor Noah.
	So yesterday, Trevor Noah literally said that Israel should stop defending itself because they're too good at defending themselves.
	Just personally, I cannot watch that footage and hear those numbers and see a fair fight.
	Like, set aside motives and intentions and just look at technology.
	Technology alone.
	Israel has one of the most powerful militaries in the world.
	And I know that people are going to hate me for this, but I just want to ask an honest question here.
	If you are in a fight where the other person cannot beat you, How hard should you retaliate when they try to hurt you?
	As hard as you need to to make them stop hurting you.
	Also, by hurt you, I think that he is making a pretty significant category error here.
	There's a difference between a child trying to physically harm me and a terrorist group firing rockets at people and murdering them.
	The answer is as much as you need to do to stop Hamas's capacity to commit terror attacks.
	But I guess I shouldn't be surprised because the entire American left has also decided that if a black girl swings a knife at another black girl, the cop shouldn't shoot her because of power imbalance or some such nonsense.
	None of this is shocking.
	It's just morally blind.
	And moral blindness is the name of the game when it comes to the American and international left.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
	The Matt Walsh Show airs 1.30 p.m.
	Eastern.
	Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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