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June 3, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:17
We Didn’t Start The Fire | Ep. 1268
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Democrats claim that Republicans threaten democracy while simultaneously threatening democracy.
And we examine whether the real threat to the American economy is inflation or complete government-driven stagnation.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so.
The constant theme from the Democrats and from the media these days is that there is a deep, abiding threat to American democracy.
And I think there are certainly threats to American democracy.
I just don't think they are coming from where the left says they are coming from.
I think that the great threat to American democracy these days, and to a civilized way of life, is the authoritarian left that is on the move inside every American institution.
An authoritarian left that is seeking to centralize power and to quash all dissent from its opponents in pretty much every major institution in American life.
Whether we're talking about the scientific institutions or whether we're talking about our educational institutions, certainly the media that push forward this authoritarianism.
I mean, the press openly root at this point for those who dissent to be quashed.
They openly attempt to push social media, another institution dominated by leftists, to shut down people who disagree.
And that's not even getting to the governmental policy that is now being pushed by the Democrats, which is overtly racist and discriminatory, which is government policy that is directed at seizing money from the private sector and sucking the money out, and then apparently blowing the money back in, but into all the wrong places.
And completely redoing the way democracy has historically been done in the United States.
America is a liberal republic.
Okay, there's a focus on the word liberal there because it's classically liberal.
The whole point of the American Constitution is that pure mob rule is tyranny.
If you look at the Federalist Papers, all the founders say this.
Pure mob rule is just a different sort of tyranny.
Mobocracy is not, in fact, democracy.
Liberal democracy requires that there be certain pre-existing individual rights.
Those rights of pre-existing government.
Government was formed in order to protect those rights.
This is why there are checks and balances.
Otherwise, you wouldn't need checks and balances.
And the left, the authoritarian left, says you don't need checks and balances.
What you need is effectively an elected dictatorship in which the bureaucracy decides all of your rights and all of your duties.
And then, by mob rule, they can be replaced at any time.
This is what the left would prefer.
And some people on the left aren't even shy about this, right?
Ibram X. Kendi, who's the ideological...
grandfather at this point of the entire democratic agenda.
Ibram X. Kendi has openly stated and pushed for a department of anti-racism, a federal department of anti-racism, where there would be a bureaucratic department inside the Justice Department, presumably, and their entire job, or be a cabinet-level department, their entire job would be to strike down any law, state, local, or federal, That ends with disparate impact, right?
That ends by impacting different racial groups differently, or that ends with inequality of outcome.
Okay, that's tyranny.
And the left isn't being shy about all of this.
And yet, at the same time, the left is demagoguing all of this by suggesting that the right is the true threat to democracy.
Now, I'm not going to pretend that there aren't people on the right who have wanted to quote-unquote overthrow the system.
And when you have Defy, like, Michael Flynn out there suggesting that we should have a Myanmar-like coup.
Obviously, that is going to be fuel on the fire for the Democrats.
But when we're talking about who has institutional power, who's actually attempting to do this right now, it is important to recognize that the left is playing up January 6th because the true authoritarian threat to the country, meaning the threat that is most likely to succeed, is not a bunch of droogs running into the Capitol building on January 6th and then within hours being dissipated and All of the mechanisms of the republic moving forward as normal.
The real threat is the overarching change that the left wishes to bring to the country.
And yet the left pretends that it is not the aggressor in this.
The left has been pushing on every single front.
They've been pushing cultural radicalism.
They've been pushing racial polarization.
They've been pushing the breakdown of democratic institutions.
They want to get rid of the filibuster.
They want to get rid of the Senate.
I mean, you had the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, literally say yesterday that we have a serious problem in the United States when Wyoming has as many votes in the Senate as California.
That's not a problem with the system.
That is the system.
The system was specifically designated so that the states have the power to check federal ambition.
This is one of the purposes of the checks and balances of the Constitution of the United States.
This is what I talk about in my new book, The Authoritarian Moment, which comes out in July, is the fact that if we're talking about the true authoritarian threat, the true authoritarian threat is not a bunch of crazy people and idiots saying ridiculous things on Twitter.
The real threat is people taking over actively institutions and then weaponizing those institutions against dissent while overthrowing the checks and balances that protect individual rights.
That's the actual authoritarian threat in the United States right now.
And the left has to demagogue this because if they can accuse the right of doing what they themselves are doing, if they can distract you over here with the shiny object, then you might not notice the fact that they are actually pushing for mobocracy and bureaucratic top-down rule.
Ben Rhodes is king of this.
So Ben Rhodes, who is just a liar.
Ben Rhodes is just a terrible human being.
He was a chief advisor to Barack Obama.
Openly admitted, by the way, that he lied to the American people repeatedly.
He openly admitted in print that he had manipulated members of the media into lying about the Iran deal.
He said that the Obama administration had found moderates inside the Iranian administration.
And that they had to embolden those moderates by signing the Iran deal.
Then later he admitted there were no moderates inside the Iranian administration.
Actually, that was all nonsense.
We just created that narrative out of whole cloth.
We lied about when we started negotiating with the Iranians, said Ben Rhodes.
And he admitted that he had an echo chamber of journalists, sycophantic journalists like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, who would just do his bidding.
He said there were a bunch of young journalists who didn't know anything about the Middle East, and they would just do whatever Ben Rhodes wanted.
So Ben Rhodes has admitted to lying to the media.
The media still suck up to him.
He's admitted to misleading the American people.
He's still considered a well-respected voice on these issues.
And of course, he was part of an administration that radically shifted American politics.
And there are a lot of folks on the left who believe that 2016 broke the country.
Ah, when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, that's when the country started to fall apart.
Wrong!
The election that broke the country in serious ways that have yet to be repaired was 2012, when the most decent person, in terms of just personal decency, who has run for public office in a very long time, Mitt Romney, was beaten by a president who was presiding over an extraordinarily slow recovery from a deep economic recession.
Who had pushed a deeply unpopular Obamacare program, who had blown out the spending, and who then engaged in a complete rewriting of how politics was done in the United States.
I think it is completely underrated what Barack Obama did between 2010 and 2012.
Between 2010 when he lost Congress and 2012 when he won re-election with a large number of votes.
He lost several million votes from 2008.
He still won in 2012, becoming the first president in a very long time to win re-election by losing votes between the two elections.
What Barack Obama did at that point was truly astonishing.
He completely redid the way American politics was done.
Instead of attempting to appeal to the broadest possible audience, Barack Obama decided he was going to throw out SOPs to a variety of identity-related groups, and then he was going to militarize that coalition against the quote-unquote prevailing white ascendancy.
He started the fire.
In other words, the Democrats started this fire.
And then they claim, oh, well, why is there this fire here?
You guys did it.
We'll get to this in just one second.
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Okay, so back to Ben Rhodes.
So Ben Rhodes is now making the rounds suggesting the democracy is under threat.
And we here in the United States, we have to show that a multiracial democracy can work.
Now, what he means by that is that Republicans are trying to stop a multiracial democracy from working.
Right?
The quiet implication here, which is not so quiet, is that Republicans are racists who want to stop multiracial democracy from working.
But the reality is, when you are overtly using government policies to cater to people of particular races, you are stopping multiracial democracy from working.
Multiracial democracy can only work when there are no preferences based on race.
But it's Democrats who are pushing overt policy, government policy, that has racial discrimination written into the policy.
Here is Ben Rhodes doing a fair bit of gaslighting right here.
Whether we're dealing with Russia or China, the most important thing the United States can do, I've come to believe, and this book was the whole process of learning this, is not any foreign policy.
We have to get our own act together.
The most powerful thing that people want from us around the world is not any one foreign policy.
It's that we can demonstrate that a multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracy can work.
And we have a lot of work to do to demonstrate that reality.
Okay, for the left, everything is a lever for the kind of change they are pushing.
Notice how Ben Rhodes is saying, you know, to fight Russia, to fight China, we don't actually have to have a strong military or a strong foreign policy.
We have to do the work.
We have to change how America is.
When you get the same thing from Joe Biden, he'll say, you know, in order to change China, in order to fight China, we need to, come on, man.
What that translates as, in order to fight China, we need to spend $6 trillion a year in the budget.
And we need to spend a huge amount of that on racially reparative policy.
We need to redo how democracy works.
We need to federalize all election law.
That's going to fight China.
Now, of course, that's not going to fight China.
But the idea from the left constantly is that America is deeply flawed and therefore we can't fight Russia and China.
Now, the reality is that America is the best system on earth.
We have the best politically designed system on earth under the Constitution of the United States.
There is no better.
There is a reason why America leads the world in virtually every economic and freedom category on a wide variety of issues until as of late apparently.
The reason for that is because it is inherent in the system and in a culture that Americans used to share with regard to God and community and social fabric and that has been almost completely blown up at this point by government interventionism and a social left on the march.
But the goal here, everything for the left, is about internal change.
It is never about fighting the bad guys.
It's never about standing up to China.
It's never about standing up to Russia.
This is why, when Donald Trump was president, their main focus was not... Trump would stand up to China.
He would stand up to Russia.
And they would get angry.
He would stand up to Iran and he'd kill their terrorist leader.
And they'd get mad.
They'd be like, yes, but the real change has to take place here, at home.
At home.
Okay, this is how the left thinks.
And they think, of course, and they lie.
They say that it's the right that started the culture war in the United States.
The culture wars have driven things to an extraordinary polarization in American politics again.
That's because the left is always pushing systemic change.
Systemic change that destroys any level of comedy in American politics.
Systemic change that destroys mainstay institutions in American life.
So here's a perfect example.
Today's New York Times.
This really struck me.
There's an essay by a person named Cole Stangler, a journalist based in France.
It's called France is becoming more like America.
It's terrible.
Which is an amazing statement.
First of all, if France were more like America, we wouldn't have to go over there every so often and save their asses from the Nazis.
But aside from that, France is becoming more like America, and it's terrible.
The reason that people in France have been saying that France is becoming more like America is because they have adopted a lot of the racially polarizing politics of the United States.
Who does Cole Stangler blame this on?
He blames it on the right, which is crazy.
You can see the role reversal that's taking place.
The left starts a culture war, and when the right responds, it's, how dare the right even respond?
You guys should stay out of the culture wars.
The answer is no.
The right is not going to stay out of the culture wars.
You started the fire.
You did it.
And we are going to fight for values that we hold dear.
We are going to cling to values that have undergirded classical liberalism and traditional values morality for hundreds of years when it comes to government and thousands of years when it comes to those values.
He'll get to this piece in just a second, because it really is telling.
It's really telling how the left does this gaslighting routine.
You guys are destroying democracy.
Meanwhile, Soto Voce, well, you know, we really need to get rid of all these democratic institutions.
You guys started the culture war, Soto Voce.
Well, what if boys were girls and girls were boys?
I mean, it's unbelievable.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so there's this piece in the New York Times that really is very telling.
For some of these critics, it's the reason so many young people adopting the view of Black Lives Matter activists believe police violence is a problem.
cabinet, to the far-right opposition, from print columnists to talking heads, Americanization is increasingly held responsible for a whole set of social ills ailing the nation.
For some of these critics, it's the reason so many young people adopting the view of Black Lives Matter activists believe police violence is a problem.
For others, it explains why the quality of academic research is in decline, as fanciful ideas concocted on American college campuses like intersectionality and post-colonialism supposedly flourish.
To others still, it's why people can't speak their mind anymore suffocated by the threats of cancel culture.
Perhaps the most common gripe is that ideas and practices imported from the United States are making the French obsessed with ethnic, religious, and sexual difference at the expense of their shared identity as citizens of the Universal Republic.
They're not wrong.
French politics are in fact becoming Americanized.
Okay, so it seems like this columnist is going to say, yes, the left.
From the left's perspective, it is the right that is the problem.
The problem is not left-wing theories or censorious scolds.
It's the rise of an insular nationalistic right-wing discourse, driven by a belligerent style of press coverage, distinctively French in content, the form this discourse takes.
Grievance-swallowing hosts conjuring embittered conversations about national decline, immigration, and religion follows America's lead.
As in the United States, the result is a degraded political landscape that empowers the far right, dragging mainstream politicians into its orbit.
Culture wars are America's true gift to France.
Okay, so instead of recognizing that America right now has moved into a period of deep political polarization because the left is speeding so fast to the left.
I mean, they're Thelma and Louise off the cliff.
Remember, 30 years ago?
The concept of decriminalizing homosexuality was still a controversial idea in the United States.
And then the United States was like, well, you know what?
We're not gonna criminalize bedroom activity, which I think is the right move.
And then there was an argument about civil unions.
And people were like, should they get the same sort of contractual benefits as people who are married?
People with two men versus a man and a woman.
And people on the right were like, sure, okay, I guess.
And then it went to, okay, gay marriage.
Marriage that's exactly the same under law and treated with respect by everyone.
And it won't hurt you.
And then it went to religious institutions have to perform gay marriages and your child has to be indoctrinated in this.
And then it went to boys and girls, since marriage now no longer is between a boy and a girl or a man and a woman.
Now, because of all of that, we should just recognize the truth, which is that boys and girls don't exist.
And so if a boy says he's a girl and a girl says she's a boy, that means they should compete in sports against one.
Like the rush to the left on social issues from the left is unbelievable.
Remember, Bill Clinton in the 1990s, being a pro-abortion politician, still said things like safe, legal and rare.
There was a baseline acknowledgement that abortion was a bad thing.
Now, the left speaks out about how wonderful abortion is.
Abortion is an asset.
Don't tell me that the right has gotten more right-wing.
It's just a lie.
All that happened is that the right stopped surrendering on every single issue because they finally reached some core issues they couldn't surrender on.
It's the left that has pushed these culture wars.
It is the left that has decided to polarize Americans around issues that would have been considered absolutely Uncontroversial, even 10 years ago.
10 years ago, it would have been considered an uncontroversial idea that a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl.
That would have been considered absolutely conventional in 2010, 2011.
Now, you say that sort of stuff and you're afraid that your business is going to fire you.
The left's culture wars have driven this.
And then the left says, well, if we can't get done what we want to get done, it's the checks and balances that have to go.
The woke cultural left has moved into the governmental left.
And that merger is creating tremendous rifts in American public life.
Who started that?
The left did.
The left has been rushing so fast to the left.
Remember, Bernie Sanders was a fringe figure 10 years ago.
Now, Bernie Sanders is considered a thought leader of the Democratic Party.
You think the squad would have any power in the Democratic Congress 15, 20 years ago?
Absolutely not.
They'd be seen in exactly the same way as Cynthia McKinney was seen inside the Democratic Party, who was the last Democrat who apparently Democrats were able to condemn.
For overt anti-Semitism.
Now you have Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Alexander Ocasio-Cortez leading the squad as an ideological threat inside the halls of Congress.
Don't tell me the right started this fire.
That's a lie.
It's not true.
Donald Trump didn't start this fire.
He was a symptom, not a cause.
As I've said many times, Donald Trump himself, I know the left wants to treat it as though the universe began spinning when Donald Trump became president, but that's not true.
He performed exactly in line with other Republican candidates.
He won about the same percentage of the popular vote as Mitt Romney did.
The reason for that is because the left has created a hard core on the right of people who are going to resist them, and the more they push, the more resistance there will be.
And then, of course, they'll blame you, and they'll blame democracy.
I mean, look how far they've pushed on culture.
So yesterday, there was a video making the rounds on the internet of a girl in Texas who was valedictorian of her high school.
And instead of reading her valedictory address, which had been pre-approved, which is typically how this is done at high schools all around the nation.
Instead, she got up and she decided to rant about abortion and how abortion was a wonderful thing for women.
And she was cheered for this.
Hillary Clinton, remember, her husband said safe, legal, and rare.
This girl was like, if we don't have abortion, women can't succeed in American life.
And Hillary Clinton was cheering it.
Here's what this young woman had to say.
I have dreams, and hopes, and ambitions.
Every girl graduating today does.
And we have spent our entire lives working towards our future.
And without our input, and without our consent, our control over that future has been stripped away from us.
I am terrified that if my contraceptives fail, I am terrified that if I am raped, then my hopes and aspirations and dreams and efforts for my future will no longer matter.
Okay, what she's saying is morally horrifying, right?
She's saying that her hopes and aspirations rely on killing a baby in the womb.
That's what she's actually saying.
She throws in rape there, but the reality is that the vast majority of people who are having abortions in the United States, as in on the order of over 99%, are not people who have been raped or are victims of incest.
The vast majority of people who have abortions in the United States are having abortions because they don't want the baby.
But that is treated not only as mainstream political rhetoric these days, that abortion is a fundamental good.
It's a guarantor of women's rights.
It's a guarantor that you're able to do what you want in the workplace.
Now, it turns out that there are other ways to avoid getting pregnant.
Namely, don't have sex.
Use birth control, use a couple forms of birth control.
You could theoretically do what my wife and I did and get married before you have babies, right?
There are lots of things you can do.
But the idea here that abortion is the sole guarantor, that it is the last available battlement before women's rights are breached is an insane one, but the left has fully embraced this.
To the point where Andrew Cuomo was lighting up buildings in New York pink after they passed a basic abortion on demand up until point of birth bill in New York.
Who's pushing the culture war?
The people who are pushing the culture war are the folks on the left.
Again, Hillary Clinton tweeted out, this took guts.
Thank you for not saying silent, Paxton.
Did it take guts though?
Because she knew she'd be celebrated.
Beto O'Rourke tweeted, Paxton, thank you for having the courage of your convictions and inspiring Texas with your refusal to accept injustice as the price of participation in civic life bra.
Maybe I'll use our place in this democracy to fight for what we believe to be right and follow your example.
Yeah, you should follow her example by, you know, shouting about how abortion is just an indubitable moral good.
It's just an incredible moral good.
Accept injustice as the price of participation.
Again, no one is forcing her to get pregnant.
Nobody is suggesting that she cannot make the decision not to have a baby.
Okay, but once you have a baby in your womb, that is an independent human.
It really is.
The culture wars are being driven by the left.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay.
Speaking of the culture war, see, here's the thing.
Culture wars are a bunch of little battles.
And every time there's a little battle, people on the left say, well, why are you even pushing back on this?
Again, this is all part of the broader gaslighting.
So the broader gaslighting is, we didn't start the culture war, you guys are the culture warriors.
And we're like, wait, I'm a culture warrior because I say that abortion is bad and men and women exist?
I'm confused.
Like, how did that make me the aggressor in this culture war?
And this is why the media are constantly using the language of Republicans Pounce.
Every time something happens that the left is pushing, it's Republicans Pounce.
The story is not Republicans Pouncing.
The story is the left pushing an aggressive move.
Okay, but then they say, okay, so there'll be a little cultural battle.
That seems to not make much of a difference.
And the right will push back.
They'll say, why are you even pushing back on this cultural battle?
Why can't you just take the L?
Why are you even sounding off about this?
Why is it even important to get your thoughts on, for example, Chris Harrison being booted off The Bachelor?
And the answer is, because every little aggressive move is an inch in your direction.
And that has to be checked.
That has to be stopped.
But it's not being stopped.
It is marching forward full scale.
We've now learned again, it's important to recognize that small issues add up to a big issue.
Small changes add up to a big change.
Okay, so when The Bachelor, which again is a very popular TV show in the United States, ousts its host for the great sin of having said that a girl should have grace.
So people should give a girl grace.
For having, when she was 19 years old, gone to an antebellum ball at her college.
He loses his hosting gig, and he's now apparently not returning to Bachelor in Paradise.
All of this over saying the same thing that this girl's black boyfriend was saying at the time before he decided to reverse himself and take the woke position that his girlfriend was actually evil.
Apparently, she's now back with him, which is, frankly, an incredible lack of self-esteem.
I mean, seriously, note to all ladies, if your boyfriend publicly calls you a racist and says you have work to do, you shouldn't be with him.
He's a jerk.
Okay, but put that aside, Chris Harrison, who wasn't even involved in that core relationship, has now lost his job.
And by the way, the ratings for The Bachelor are gonna pay the price here.
According to Variety, Chris Harrison's future with The Bachelor franchise remains in limbo, as the longtime host will sit out the summer season of Bachelor in Paradise.
Instead, the role will be filled by celebrity comedians, including David Spade.
Good luck with that.
By the way, David Spade's a comedian.
I can't imagine he's never told a risque joke.
Harrison has been on the sidelines and embroiled in controversy since February, when he made highly criticized comments during an interview about the controversy surrounding The Bachelor.
Kirkconnell had attended an antebellum-themed fraternity party in 2018, while she was a college student.
When the controversial images resurfaced on social media this year, Harrison defended Kirkconnell.
And then, of course, Rachel Lindsay went after him because she knew that she could get him fired, and she knew that she could get him removed, and that she would earn all sorts of media plaudits for doing so, despite the fact that she herself has capitalized on wokeness to an extraordinary extent.
She literally cut an Instagram post in the middle of the BLM protest-slash-riot in front of a Cadillac, talking about how she experiences the racial injustice of the United States by listening to Bluetooth on her Cadillac.
Again, all of these cultural issues, they may not mean much, but they mean everything.
They may not mean much individually, but they mean everything collectively.
Because when the entire culture is designed to push a particular point of view, people will fight back against that.
When the entire culture is designed to suggest that you're a bad person for believing in traditional values with regard to, for example, sexuality, people will push back against that.
That is not, the people who are pushing back are pushing back.
Okay, they're pushing back because you are aggressing.
And when you say to people that you can't bring up your kids the way that you want to bring up your kids because it makes you a religious bigot to say to your children that you would prefer that your boy marry a girl and that your girl marry a boy.
Okay, people are going to push back on that and they should push back on that because traditional values still matter.
None of that means you have to be intolerant of gay and lesbian people.
But that is a far cry from what the culture is pushing, which is the notion that you are in fact a bad person if you are if you are Excited about the probability of your child marrying someone of the opposite sex.
You're not allowed to express a preference as to whether your child marries a person of the opposite sex and provides you natural grandchildren.
You're not even allowed to mention that these days.
Right?
That's dangerous stuff.
So who's the cultural?
And then this is pushed into governmental policy and structural policy.
So what the left says is, okay, we're going to push super hard on the culture side.
And then if you push back, this just shows that you're an intolerant bigot.
Intolerant bigots shouldn't be part of the conversation.
And let me tell you, there are institutions that magnify the influence of intolerant bigots.
So what we really need to do is change all of those systems so we no longer have to pay attention to the intolerant bigots.
This has been part of the broader argument made by people like Ronald Brownstein for years on the left, the so-called demographic argument in the United States, which is shockingly similar to the demographic argument made by the alt-right.
The left has been saying since basically Barack Obama won in 2008 that there was an ascendant coalition of minorities, and the minorities would eventually be the majority.
And then they would just run roughshod over this white supremacist country.
This was called the Browning of America.
There were pieces about it in the Atlantic.
And people like me are like, that's a really racist way to think of the world.
There are plenty of people who are brown who don't vote for Democrats.
And in fact, race is not destiny.
Demographics are not destiny.
The alt-right, by the way, makes the same argument as the left.
They say that they want to restrict immigration because only white people can be trusted with politics, which is weird because it suggests they've never been to Wellesley, an overly white place with a lot of extraordinarily liberal people.
But the broader argument, which is that we need this coalition of minorities, and that if we don't win it's because people are trying to suppress the minority vote, is again part and parcel of this broader culture war that is now being pushed into the realm of governmental policy.
Institutions have to be changed so that this coalition can win more often, is the case that the left is making these days.
Which is why now they're pushing very hard on HR1.
These things are not disconnected.
HR1 is being pushed because the left wants its way on everything.
And if you refuse to give them their way on everything, they suggest that you are just part of this remnant of old white racists.
They'll even go after members of their own party.
I mean, the other day, Joe Biden pretty clearly went after Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, members of his own party.
Kyrsten Sinema happens to be bisexual, by the way.
He went after both of them for failing to destroy the filibuster.
An institution that Joe Biden five minutes ago was talking about as the hallmark of American democracy.
Now he wants to destroy the filibuster.
So here is Joe Biden going after members of his own party for not wanting to destroy the system.
I hear all the folks on TV saying, why doesn't Biden get this done?
Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.
But we're not giving up.
Okay, he's pretty obviously going after members of his own party there, right?
Jen Psaki then tried to walk that back to, oh, well, you know, Joe didn't mean Sinema.
He meant other people. He pretty obviously did not, by the way.
I mean, if you look at what the president said, the big tell here is I hear all the folks on TV saying now as a former TV pundit myself.
I can tell you that sometimes these conversations can be oversimplified.
TV isn't always made for complex conversations about policymaking.
We all know that, right?
He was not giving a specific commentary on a policy.
He was conveying again that sometimes that's the summary, shorthand version that he sees on cable news.
No, that's nonsense.
Okay, we all know what Joe Biden was trying to do and it was put pressure on Manchin and Sinema.
In fact, the Washington Post is trying to do the same thing today.
Good for her.
Kyrsten Sinema is still standing up for at least the basic notion of the filibuster in the Senate.
Here she was yesterday just flat out saying, no, I'm not going to kill the filibuster.
I've long been a supporter of the filibuster because it is a tool that protects the democracy of our nation.
Rather than allowing our country to ricochet wildly every two to four years back and forth between policies, the idea of the filibuster was created by those who came before us, the United States Senate, to create comity and to encourage senators to find bipartisanship.
She's right about this, but apparently this makes her part of the right-wing majoritarian or minority control chamber.
This makes her bad.
The left is pressing on all these issues.
It's the left that started this.
And you can see it, right?
The Washington Post has an article today, pressure mounts on Manchin as quote-unquote panic sets in among Democrats over voting rights.
Because otherwise, you know, it's the new Jim Crow.
I mean, Joe Biden has even said that that Georgia voting law, that was the new Jim Crow.
Sure, it is more permissive with regard to voting than his home state of Delaware.
Sure, the new Texas law is more permissive of early voting than his home state of Delaware.
But you know, it's like Jim Crow.
And if Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema don't bend to it, Don't bend to getting rid of the filibuster and completely federalizing election procedure in violation of the Constitution.
This just means that they are part of the polarizing half of the United States.
Remember when Joe Biden said at the beginning he wanted unity?
And I said, unity can mean one of two things.
It can mean that we try to come together around shared policy and around shared ideas, or it can mean I run roughshod over you.
And I suggested that Joe Biden meant the latter.
Pretty obvious which one Joe Biden meant.
Alrighty, in just one second, we're gonna get to the latest on the economic news, because I have a theory that has been creeping into my head of late, that inflation is not the true danger to the American economy.
Something else is.
We'll get to that in just one second first.
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Okay, so as you may have been noticing, the threat that I've been talking about here...
is the threat of authoritarianism.
It's cultural authoritarianism, running roughshod over people, militarizing all of your social institutions against you.
It's the threat of governmental authoritarianism, pushed by social authoritarians.
I read about this in my brand new book, The Authoritarian Moment.
It comes out in July.
It is really an important book.
It goes through all of this, chapter and verse.
It goes through chapter by chapter and examines how every major institution in American life was militarized on behalf of the authoritarian left.
And more importantly, how we push back.
Because in order to understand how you reverse the progress that has been made by the radical left, you have to understand how they made that push in the first place successfully.
So...
If you're an American who knows what all of this means for our future as a free country, it's time to read up on the truth in order to stand up to the woke authoritarians.
The Authoritarian Moment is now available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or any other major bookseller.
Go buy a copy today and you'll be the first to receive it when the book finally emerges, The Authoritarian Moment.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So meanwhile, there's more indicators that the economy is not going swimmingly right here.
Yesterday, the Dallas Federal Reserve executive, he came out and he said that the next jobs report is going to be rather odd.
It's not going to be exactly what people are expecting, namely this giant jump in growth.
These structural issues, which we saw in the early May report for April, supply issues, fear of infection, all those tensions, they're not actually going to go away Even for the next jobs report, we think you're going to see another maybe odd or unusual report.
That odd or unusual report, will that look like a miss of 750,000 jobs, which is what happened last month?
The Dallas Fed Chief, Robert Kaplan, making that comment.
According to Politico, businesses say they can't find enough workers to hire.
The pace of Americans moving off the unemployment rolls is slowing.
And a top Federal Reserve official is warning that job trends in May might look odd.
All of that suggests that the next monthly U.S.
employment report, which will be released on Friday morning, may not show the robust growth that President Biden needs to help pass his sweeping agenda.
On the heels of April's sluggish job growth, which shocked economic forecasters and sparked debate over a nationwide worker shortage, the May data will be closely watched for an indication of whether something significant is holding back the labor market recovery, such as what Republicans say are overly generous federal unemployment benefits, or whether the previous data was nothing more than a one-month blip.
Democrats are downplaying the concerns.
Maintaining the path back to full employment was always going to be winding and stacked with challenges.
I don't know why it would be winding and stacked with challenges, considering it was an artificial depression, and now we have a natural recovery.
Yeah, but Jen Psaki is trying to push this idea.
It's unbelievable.
Jen Psaki is now suggesting that the labor shortage is not caused by people being paid to stay home.
Labor shortage is caused by people who are still afraid to go back to work because of COVID.
No, that's not true.
And by the way, if you're afraid to go back to work because of COVID, after you've been vaccinated, 50% of all American adults have now been fully vaccinated.
The rates of spread in this country are extraordinarily low.
We are now down to below 10,000 new cases a day, which, by the way, is the metric that Anthony Fauci wants declared to be the end of the pandemic.
That's where we are, like right now.
But here's Jen Psaki trying to claim that it is not her bad economic policy that is causing all of this.
No, no, no, no.
It's that people are still afraid of COVID.
Honestly, if you know people who are still walking around in deathly fear of COVID, it's because they haven't been watching anything and or they are sheep and or they are stupid.
Our view is that it's going to take time for workers to regain confidence in the safety of the workplace, reestablish child care, school and commuting arrangements, and finish getting vaccinated.
And even when individuals get their first dose, we've seen a huge increase in that.
As I started the briefing talking about, it's about a five to six week cycle.
So we have expected that to have an impact.
No, you didn't expect it to have this kind of impact, which is why you were all shocked by the economic numbers that came out last month.
As Hot Air points out, we still have over 12 million continuing pandemic-enhanced unemployment claims being paid, while over 7 million job openings are left unfilled.
So we're paying 12 million people to stay home, there are 7 million unfilled jobs.
Things are going great.
Business owners are complaining about lack of interest in jobs.
I know business owners who are literally paying people to show up for interviews.
They're paying them extra bonuses just to get them to show up for, like, baseline jobs.
The costs on labor right now are going up tremendously.
And people on the left, they're saying, oh, well, that's what we're celebrating.
Well, the problem is if businesses don't have the margins, those businesses aren't going to be able to hire people at those labor rates.
Apparently, there are negative impacts on retail sales in the latest reports.
We talked yesterday about shrinkflation, in which businesses are beginning to give you less bang for your buck.
You get a smaller package for the same amount of money.
The political question over the next jobs report is murkier than this easy prediction.
One more bad report in a row might spur Congress to end the pandemic unemployment programs before their September expiration.
Okay, Joe Biden could do something, or, theoretically, he could do nothing.
Okay, so this raises the question as to what the mid-to-long-term situation of the United States is economically.
So there are a couple of possibilities that are worth discussing.
Some we've discussed on the program before.
That is the short-term inflation.
So right now, because Joe Biden is injecting tons of money into the economy with this quote-unquote relief act, right, he is sending money out, literal checks, to people, that is gonna lead to some short-term inflation because you have more money in the system following fewer goods.
You have supply chain holdups, You have people who are not able to go back to work.
That means same amount of product, more demand because you're forcing money back into the system, and that's going to lead to increased prices.
Now, that could lead to runaway inflation.
It could.
But over the course of the past 40 years, it's been a while since we had runaway inflation in the United States.
After 2007, 2008, we didn't have runaway inflation in the United States.
So, David Bonson of the Bonson Group, I heard him speaking about this recently, and he had a different take that I think is worth noting here.
And that take is that the big long-term threat to the United States is not, in fact, some sort of inflationary cycle like we saw in the 70s.
You might get a short-term inflationary burst, like you saw in the 1970s.
But his big point is that the government does not have the capacity, short of literally just continuing to send stimulus checks to people.
They don't have the capacity to actually inflate.
Because the real way that inflation typically is done is the Fed lowers its rate at which banks lend to one another.
It lowers the overnight rate at which banks lend to one another because they have to have their balance sheets all set up for the next day.
Or the Fed tries to inject money into the system by buying bonds from these banks, and then the banks have money to lend out.
What happens if there's no demand for the money to lend out?
Then the money doesn't get injected in the system, right?
What if businesses who have already leveraged up, and by the way, businesses have leveraged up, right?
Businesses that want to borrow money, because borrowing is so easy, they've already borrowed the money.
Over the course of the last year, businesses have moved from like a three times leverage ratio to like a five times leverage ratio.
So businesses have been leveraging up, they've been borrowing money to buy back their own stock in some cases, to grow in other cases, to maintain their share of the market or stay alive in other cases.
But what happens when the demand for that money goes away?
What happens when businesses have no place else to spend the money because the economy is stagnant and because the government is removing so much money from the system via taxation and regulation that there is no possibility of growth?
That's when you get secular stagnation.
Secular stagnation means long-term and thoroughgoing throughout the economy.
This is exactly what happened in Japan.
So in the 1980s, Japan was going to be the big threat.
Japan was going to be the country that was going to eat our lunch economically.
You had books and movies like Rising Sun.
There's a reason why in Die Hard.
It's Nakatomi Plaza.
The quote-unquote Japanese are going to come and take everything.
They're buying real estate.
They're taking over everything.
Isn't that really scary?
And then Japan's economy completely fell apart.
And Japan tried to spur their economy through central bank spending.
They tried to push lower interest rates.
They tried to push money into the economy and nothing happened.
Nothing happened because they had already regulated the economy too much, and because they continue to regulate the economy a lot, because they had taken a lot of money out of the economy, and because there was no real possibility of explosive growth.
Businesses had no reason to take out money.
Like, you're not going to take out a loan if you have no reason to take out the loan.
Why would you take on debt if there's no way that you're going to repay the debt?
Or, alternatively, if you're taking out the debt so that you can pay back the bank over a long period of time.
Like, that's not going to happen.
So this is why when Joe Biden put out his budget proposal, which was $6 trillion, he said in the budget proposal that he was expecting about a 2% rate of growth for the next 10 years.
That's a super low rate of growth, a very low rate of growth.
I think the real possibility here And this is what Bonson mentions, I think this is probably right, is that we actually undershoot that.
That we don't end up at a 2% rate of growth every year.
That we end up at a 1.5% rate of growth every year.
Or a 1.3% rate of growth every year.
Because as the government has to pay back all of the money on the interest, it's going to have to raise taxes.
As it raises taxes, it's going to have to take money out of the private system of entrepreneurship.
As it takes money out of that private system, people are going to be able to hire less.
The government...
The Soviet Union didn't have a huge inflation problem.
They had a huge stagnation problem.
So right now, the big problem with overregulation, and this is true for Europe as well, if you see the stagnation of places like Sweden, the problem there wasn't Weimar Republic, we're going to have wheelbarrows full of Deutschmarks that you run around and you have to throw them at somebody for a loaf of bread.
That's not what happened in Sweden when Sweden's economy stagnated.
Instead, taking too much money out of the economy, taxing too much, regulating too much, making it very difficult for business to do what it could do.
You can lower the interest rate as much as you want, but if businesses can't do their business, nobody's going to take that money out of the banks.
There will not be loans.
You just will not be able... You're not going to be able to inflate.
So the point that Bonson makes, and I think this is right, is that there is this baseline assumption that the central government of the United States is capable of superheating the economy.
That they can actually generate this kind of superheated, massive growth rate, superheated economy.
What we're seeing right now is actually evidence that that's not the case.
What we're seeing right now is that when the government gets deeply involved and provides things like greater unemployment benefits, when the government provides free healthcare and free childcare, when it does a lot of these things, what it ends up doing, because on the other end you have to tax the hell out of people and regulate the hell out of people, is you end up removing all of the incentive structures that would make it lucrative to take out a loan from the bank.
And that is a major problem for the US economy going forward.
So maybe Republicans, yes.
It's well worthwhile to point out that the policies followed by the Biden administration in this moment are creating short-term price shocks.
Whether we are still in an inflationary cycle two years from now, I think that's rather unlikely.
I think the Fed Reserve says it's rather unlikely too.
It could be, but that's not what the past few decades have shown.
Instead, what it's shown is that what prevents inflation is deflation.
What prevents inflation is lack of demand.
What prevents inflation is that the government sucks at its job.
There are two ways the government can suck at its job.
One is they run the printing press, and the other is they literally cannot galvanize any sort of growth, but they are still removing money from the private sector and redistributing it via the public sector in ways that inhibit the ability of the economy to grow overall.
Meanwhile, just blowing out the debt over time, which will lead to austerity measures.
I think that is the most likely path that we are headed for, is a secular stagnation.
It looks like it's already setting in, thanks to our great and wonderful President Joe Biden and the Democratic administration.
All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show coming up soon.
The Matt Wahl Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out at dailywire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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