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Sept. 13, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:51
George W. Bush’s Delusional 9/11 Call For Unity | Ep. 1336
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Former President George W. Bush speaks at the 9-11 memorial in Shanksville and compares the January 6th rioters to the 9-11 terrorists.
Joe Biden's surrender to Al Qaeda continues on 9-11, and Democrats turn to internecine warfare over their $3.5 trillion budget buster.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Alrighty, so...
I will admit to a sneaking fondness for President George W. Bush.
He was the president for most of my late childhood.
I was 16 years old when George W. Bush took office in 2000.
And in 2001, so I was 17.
16, 17, right on that cusp.
And he was president, obviously, for the next eight years.
That was a quite defining time in my thinking.
And I remember defending George W. Bush from all the people who called him Bush Hitler, and all the people who said that he lied us into war, and all the people who suggested that he was a war criminal.
And the main gripe that many people who are George W. Bush fans had is that George W. Bush spent eight years being a very nice person.
He spent eight years basically allowing everybody to attack him with alacrity and never defending himself.
It always felt as though there were millions and millions of Americans who were out defending his policies and he was not doing a good job of defending his own policies.
And then he left and when he left he was very unpopular because of the economic downturn and he essentially disappeared for years from the American political scene because like his father, he believed that ex-presidents shouldn't really be seen and they really shouldn't be heard.
They should just sort of go away and allow their successors to do what they're going to do.
But then George W. Bush started cropping up in places from time to time.
You would see him doing an ad campaign with the Clintons and the Obamas.
You'd see him hobnobbing with Michelle Obama.
And every time he spoke out politically, it seemed like he was doing so in order to ding the right.
It seemed as though he would never speak out with regard to the left because that would have been insulting.
But he would speak out about Ted Cruz, for example, or he would speak out about Black Lives Matter.
He put out a statement last year that was very sympathetic toward Black Lives Matter.
And now George W. Bush showed up at the 9-11 memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to commemorate the 20th anniversary Of 9-11 and I think that George W. Bush represents a certain sort of delusional conciliatory attitude that some establishment Republicans still have with regard to politics.
Now, I think that you can have worthwhile, useful discussions with people on the opposite side of the political aisle.
I do it all the time.
On our Sunday special, we routinely invite people who are not of my political thinking, and we have long-form discussions about that.
I may do that more than anybody else on the right.
I appear on shows where people disagree with me pretty frequently, and I think it's important to do so.
But to pretend that we are at a level of unity in American politics, where we simply are not, is to mistake the moment.
It is to ignore where we are in American politics and frankly where we have been for a very long time because the truth is that American politics was very broken even during the Bush era.
I know that we're supposed to look back and think that the world began spinning during the Trump era or during the Obama era.
The reality is it did not take long after 9-11 for the left immediately to swivel and start beating George W. Bush with a hammer.
It did not take long for Hillary Clinton to appear on the floor of the Senate saying, what did Bush know and when did he know it about 9-11?
The implication being that the Bush administration had ignored the intelligence that would have prevented 9-11, for example.
It did not take long for Howard Dean to start talking about how George W. Bush was essentially a war criminal.
It did not take very long for the Democratic media To try to suggest that George W. Bush was a liar, that he was a fool, that he was attempting to lie us into war in Iraq, that he was a warmonger, and all the rest.
That he had gotten us stuck in a quagmire.
That was the word of the day in 2003.
And George W. Bush never really seemed to understand what had happened.
I think after 9-11, he was still working in the 9-11 mode because there was a transformative moment for just a moment in American politics.
It's the only time I can remember it in my entire lifetime.
After 9-11, there was a feeling among Americans that yes, actually there is an existential enemy out there, and that enemy is not us.
We may not like our neighbors.
We may think that the people who disagree with us on politics in America have it wrong.
But there is a difference in kind between the guy who lives down the street and disagrees with you about tax law and the person who is attempting to fly a plane into a building resulting in 3,000 American deaths and the pictures of human beings jumping to their death from the 85th story of the World Trade Center.
There was a difference in kind.
For a brief moment in America, there was a feeling like, okay, we're unified as a country.
And it went away almost immediately.
It went away very, very, very quickly.
And I don't think that George W. Bush ever really took stock of that.
I think he's always been longing for that moment.
Again, I understand it.
I understand the nostalgia for that moment.
But to pretend that that is the underlying reality of America right now, that when you get right down to it, we still are all friends, we still all agree, we still are all on the same page, I think ignores how much has changed over the course of the last 20 years.
I think it's why we are in such a dire situation.
It's why I've written Three separate books now about why it seems like our unifying principles are coming apart.
Principles that we actually did sort of commonly hold even in 2000.
Principles about the general role of government in American life.
It was Bill Clinton who was saying in the 1990s that the era of big government was over.
Principles that we held about the necessity for treating other human beings as individuals.
It was Bill Clinton, who in 1992 was having a sister-soldier moment, meaning he was literally saying to people that the sort of equity talk you hear from the left, the racial talk that you hear from the left today and is celebrated by the White House, was then rejected by the Democratic Party.
The colorblind notions that Martin Luther King Jr.
was promoting, those notions had taken predominance in American life as of 2000.
That is not the case in America in 2021.
There's a very serious rift in American life and in American philosophy and in American politics.
That's a rift in values and I don't think George W. Bush really understands that and so what that ends with is George W. Bush At the 9-11 memorial saying something that I think it ends up he's trying to be unifying and it ends up being divisive because he doesn't understand the nature of modern America.
And it's this disconnect between establishment politicians and people who are sort of in the elite coterie of American life.
It's a disconnect between those folks and the rest of America that leads to the rise of populism on both the left and the right.
Because at the top of the chain, there are people who are like, yeah, we understand that politics is really sort of just rock'em, sock'em robots.
It's all just a game.
It's sort of as though if you're a fan of a baseball team and you watch the players on the field, you want them to be competitive with each other because you understand that something is at stake.
And then somebody hits a home run, it ends the game, and the other guys go out there and they're giving each other hugs.
They're out for drinks that night.
As a fan, you're like, why are you doing that?
Well, politically speaking, it's sort of the same thing, except in baseball, you understand.
Okay, well, the players, you know, it's still a game.
Politics is really not a game.
Politics is deadly serious business when you're talking about how you impact 300 million American lives.
Okay, so we'll get to what George W. Bush actually said at Shanksville in just one second.
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Okay, so George W. Bush goes to the 9-11 memorial in Shanksville, and he proceeds to say some very, very nice things.
And then he says one thing that ends up being the headline, of course, because he was trying to say something unifying and he failed.
So he starts off by talking about how Americans, when we are forced together, are exceptional, which of course is true.
20 years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans on a routine flight.
To be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror.
The 33 passengers and 7 crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate.
In a sense, they stood in for us all.
The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people facing an impossible circumstance.
They comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil.
Okay, and all of that was true.
And this is the world that George W. Bush, I think, wishes to occupy.
Frankly, it's a world I wish to occupy as well.
I mean, I think that what happened on Flight 93 is a great indicator of what Americans are when put to the test.
George W. Bush continued along these lines, and he talked a little bit about the men and women who have served in harm's way.
And you start to see the first Inklings here of why the Bush presidency, which again, I think that Bush in many ways is a man of principle, but the Bush presidency was a disappointing failure in many ways.
And I think one of the reasons was because, again, he just did not defend his own policies.
He did not defend what he was doing.
So here he was.
It's 20 years later.
We've now surrendered in Afghanistan to the very people who perpetrated 9-11.
And George W. Bush has had not a word to say about that, really.
He's had not one word about the policy.
He sat aside.
Well, Joe Biden surrendered the entire country back to the exact people who did 9-11.
I mean, like the exact people who did 9-11.
He's had nothing to say about that.
Instead, he has sort of comforting words for the members of the military, which is fine.
But where is he when it comes to the actual serious questions of policy?
Let me speak directly to veterans and people in uniform.
The cause you pursued at the call of duty is the noblest America has to offer.
You have shielded your fellow citizens from danger.
You have defended the beliefs of your country and advanced the rights of the downtrodden.
You have been the face of hope and mercy in dark places.
You have been a force for good in the world.
Nothing that has followed, nothing, can tarnish your honor or diminish your accomplishments.
To you and to the honored dead, our country is forever grateful.
That's a rather oblique critique of the Biden foreign policy in Afghanistan.
OK, so if you're going to do a unity speech, then what you really need to talk about are unifying principles, right?
You need to talk about what brings America together.
And George W. Bush did many of those things in that speech.
But if you are going to critique, then the critique has to be pointed and it has to be specific, or at least it has to be broad enough to encompass the big problems in American society.
People on the right, I think, responded with the Trump era because of the Obama era, but also because of the Bush era, as we'll see in just one second.
Because here is George W. Bush.
This is the clip that made all the headlines, right?
It wasn't all of the talk about unity.
It wasn't all the talk about bringing Americans together.
It was this line from George W. Bush that brought all the commentary.
This is the line where he compares the January 6th rioters to the 9-11 hijackers.
We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, But from violence that gathers within.
There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home.
But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit.
And it is our continuing duty to confront them.
Okay, so, everybody took this as a critique of the 1-6 rioters.
Now, it's possible to read it as a broader critique than that, right?
That he's talking about white supremacists, or that he's talking about Antifa, or that he's talking about Black Lives Matter.
The problem is, of course, that he released a statement in favor of Black Lives Matter last June, in which he talked about systemic American racism and all of the rest of the left-wing buzzwords.
And it is also possible to say that the 1-6 rioters did something evil.
I have said that.
Many, many times.
I think that storming the Capitol building on the basis of a falsehood Both that the election was stolen and that the election results were capable of being overturned after having been certified at the state level.
That was all a lie, that was not true.
And they stormed the Capitol building to compare those people, still, to the 9-11 hijackers who literally murdered 3,000 Americans.
The only American who was actually killed at the Capitol on 1-6, like died at the Capitol on 1-6 because of direct action by another human being.
The only person who actually died because of that was Ashley Babbitt, right, who was shot at the Capitol and she was one of the rioters.
That is not remotely the same thing as the 9-11 hijackers, either in their aims.
I mean, the goal of the 9-11 hijackers was to completely overthrow the system of the United States, not because of a quote-unquote stolen election or anything like that, but because they didn't believe in elections.
They believe in full-on Sharia law, right?
They wanted the kind of governance that you see in Afghanistan.
The comparison fails on nearly every level.
But what's more important is I think George W. Bush thought that he was saying something unifying here, right?
Which is that attacks on American institutions and attacks on American principles are unacceptable across the board.
But the feeling that people get on the right is that he doesn't mean it across the board.
And by the way, that was the feeling on the left as well.
Because if the left thought that he meant that across the board, if they thought that he equally meant the one six rioters and the people who burned down American cities last summer resulting in at least $5 billion in property damage, now $2 billion of insured, if they felt that he was applying that to Antifa with the same sort of alacrity that he was applying that to white supremacists, then there might be some sort of unity, but they don't feel like that.
And neither is the left.
And the reason you can tell the left doesn't feel like that is because they were giving him the strange new respect treatment.
And this is what's truly going after eight years of defending George W. Bush and his policies, after eight years of going to political battle for the Bush administration on behalf I disagreed with George W. Bush a lot, and sometimes I'd critique him.
But if you go back and read my columns, I defended many of George W. Bush's big moves when he wouldn't defend himself.
After eight years of that, to feel as though the ex-president of the United States, who you defended, only emerges to critique one side of the political aisle, even if that side deserves critique, even if those radicals deserve critique.
But he is not attempting to critique everybody.
He's only critiquing a certain group, a certain radical subsection of a movement, as opposed to, you know, the people who actually destroyed his presidency at every point.
And then to receive the strange respect from the same people who spent eight years declaring him a warmonger and a bad human being, that's how you get Trump.
That's how you get Trump, and you deserve Trump.
That's how it comes to that.
And you can see the left celebrating Bush.
You have Joe Biden, who says that Bush made a great speech about who we are.
Why do you think Joe Biden is celebrating George W. Bush?
He spent years ripping on George W. Bush.
In 2008, when Biden was running alongside Barack Obama, he labeled John McCain a continuation of the horrific Bush era.
That was the main line.
George W. Bush was so bad, and John McCain will be more of that.
I mean, Joe Biden spent years trashing George W. Bush, but now he's very happy with George W. Bush.
Which makes you think, has Joe Biden changed?
Or is George W. Bush just paying homage to a delusional conciliation that does not exist in American politics?
Here is Joe Biden.
I thought that President Bush made a really good speech today.
Genuinely good speech.
About who we are and what we're not.
The core of who we are is not divided.
The core of who we are is not divided, says Joe Biden.
This is the part where, again, I think Bush is misreading the situation.
And I think a lot of the right-wing establishment, the so-called conservative establishment, is misreading the moment.
I'll explain more of this in just one second, because when Joe Biden said that he was trying to generate unity when he was inaugurated, I said at the time, we still have to define what he means by unity.
By unity, does he mean they were going to attempt to come together around common principles and leave people alone, let them live their lives?
Or by unity, does he mean you shut the hell up and I will tell you what to do?
And it is extremely obvious at this point that Joe Biden means the latter.
And if George W. Bush means the former, then unity does not mean the same thing to George W. Bush that it means to Joe Biden.
And yet George W. Bush is using the exact same language, which is a dangerous thing to do.
It obscures clarity.
It makes things opaque.
And not only that, it grants weapons to the people who actually wish to infringe upon your freedoms each and every day and divide Americans each and every day.
So as you see, Joe Biden is praising George W. Bush for the unity speech, but he's really praising him because he believes that George W. Bush is attacking people purportedly of the right, but never anybody.
On the left, right?
This is what unity means to people of Joe Biden's ilk.
Unity means we are right and you are wrong and you shut up.
And if you disagree, there's no unity.
That's what Joe Biden means.
And I don't take seriously that Joe Biden is particularly upset about January 6th because January 6th is worse in kind than the riots we saw that wrecked the cities across the summer and have led to a radically exacerbated murder rate in every major city in America.
I just don't believe that he even believes that.
I think that he believes that people who agree with his agenda are basically good and people who disagree with his agenda are basically bad.
That is not a unifying perspective.
Kamala Harris is doing the same thing.
You're granting, this is why I'm very frustrated with George W. Bush's speech, not because of the critique of one sex, but because of the inability to know and understand that radicalism on all sides of all aisles is a major, major problem.
When you only critique one side of the aisle, and then you say that unity is in the offing, you are incorrect.
All you're doing is granting favor to people who have actively promoted the disunity.
If you're not willing to condemn all of the bad things, you're only willing to condemn some of the bad things, you're fomenting others of the bad things.
The left knows this, which is why they were using Bush's speech over the weekend.
Here's Kamala Harris doing the same thing, calling for unity.
This is absolutely galling stuff coming from Kamala Harris.
I mean, here she is calling for unity.
Unity is imperative in America.
It is essential to our shared prosperity, She's a liar.
our national security and to our standing in the world.
And by unity, I don't mean uniformity.
We had differences of opinion in 2001, as we do in 2021.
And I believe that in America, our diversity is our strength.
She's a liar.
When she says that she doesn't believe that unity is uniformity, no, she 100% does.
She does not believe in diversity of opinion in any serious way.
You can look at her legislative record on this.
It is pretty clear.
This is not a person who deeply cares about diversity of opinion.
This is a person who's part of an administration that is attacking other Americans for diversity of opinion.
Yet the same thing from the media.
You got Jim Acosta doing the same thing.
What happened to our unity?
What happened?
We didn't just become divided.
We let hate into our hearts for each other.
There was an expression used after 9-11, all gave some, some gave all.
We don't really do that anymore.
Some of us don't want to give anything at all.
We live in separate worlds now.
We don't agree on the same facts anymore.
We can't even agree on wearing masks or getting vaccinated to end this pandemic.
Why isn't there unity?
Because of you people who won't mask after being vaccinated.
Yeah, I wonder why there's not unity.
We're gonna get into that in a second because that is the crux of the matter.
Why isn't there the unity?
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Alrighty, so, George W. Bush calls for unity, and in the process of calling for unity, he basically name-checks the 1-6 rioters, but nothing else, right?
That is where he's putting his sole focus.
Which is inherently un-unifying, because it turns out that there are a lot of Threads in the fabric of America that are being torn asunder, many of them by the leadership of the United States, which George W. Bush has studiously ignored, as long as it is coming from the left, since 2008.
And this is coming from somebody who voted for George W. Bush in 2004 and supported much of his agenda.
It is extremely frustrating, and it's extremely frustrating to watch people who ripped him and wrecked his presidency now use George W. Bush and his statements as a tool to wield on behalf of an inherently ununifying agenda.
Disunifying agenda.
You got Kamala Harris saying that she also believes in unity, and Jim Acosta saying he believes in unity.
No, you don't.
You're liars.
You absolutely do not.
I know you don't, because last summer, Kamala Harris was backing rioters.
Last summer, Kamala Harris was tweeting out about how we could actually bail out rioters in Minneapolis.
You remember her famous tweet on this, her infamous tweet on this, in which she tweeted out, if you're able to, chip in now to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.
The people in jail were not protesters, they were rioters.
But don't worry, she's not for uniformity, she's only for unity.
My message to unvaccinated Americans is this.
What more is there to wait for?
It's time for us to come together.
It's time for last week, he was labeling the unvaccinated the worst among us.
And nevermind if they're, by the way, no exceptions for natural immunity, no exceptions for other health conditions.
If you're unvaccinated, you're a bad person according to Joe Biden, and he's going to lecture you about it, but he's for unity, you see.
My message to unvaccinated Americans is this, what more is there to wait for?
What more do you need to see?
We've made vaccinations free, safe, and convenient.
Thank you.
The vaccine has FDA approval.
Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot.
We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.
And your refusal has cost all of us.
That's Captain Unity over there, right?
The man who's bringing us all together.
The person with whom George W. Bush is meeting across the table to talk about unity.
You have the media.
You have Jim Acosta, one of the most divisive media figures of the last several years, out there talking about how we can't even have unity.
Why can't we have unity like we had in 9-11?
We can't even have unity about masking.
Right, because there are serious questions to be asked about the necessity of masking in a time when every American adult has the ability to go get vaccinated.
There are serious data questions to be asked about the efficacy of particular types of masks.
And there are studies that demonstrate that cloth masks against the Delta variant are not particularly effective, for example.
But according to Jim Acosta, if you don't do what he wants you to do, you are threatening unity.
And this is the shtick of the left, and George W. Bush played right into it.
The shtick of the left is, That unity is offered by monopoly.
And if you are a person who exists outside of the monopoly, then you have now created two poles, which means polarization.
Polarization is a simple result, according to the left, of your failure to agree with them.
The same media who are decrying lack of unity on 9-11 spent most of 9-11 trying to jabber about how COVID was like 9-11.
COVID is not like 9-11.
I mean, it's certainly not like 9-11 in the sense that you guys won't even blame the people who are responsible, namely the Chinese government.
But not only that, COVID's not like 9-11 because it's hit everywhere.
It's a global pandemic.
And yet the left kept saying over and over that it was like 9-11.
The implication being that people who refuse to do what we want are like the terrorists.
That is the implication.
MSNBC, Chuck Todd, over the weekend compared 9-11 to COVID.
This is not a comparison.
I guess the best way to look at the two battles that the country engaged in, we had an outside invader in Al-Qaeda, and so we were able to unite.
We had a common enemy.
With COVID, this invisible enemy, we're not able to do it.
And you know, Willie, thinking about this all week, when you actually, sadly, you look at the arc of American history, polarization in some ways is more common than us coming together.
I mean, and then you get from Nicole Wallace that it's like 9-11 every couple of days COVID.
No, it is not.
It is like a health problem that is killing a lot of people.
By the way, a health problem to which we have a solution, namely, go get yourself vaccinated.
And if you don't want to, then you bear the consequences of that.
That's not like 9-11 in any way, shape, or form.
That's like if, on 9-11, you had the option to leave the building before.
Okay, that is not the same thing.
At all.
And also, it's as though the attackers on 9-11 had no actual will or agenda.
Because viruses don't.
But here's Nicole Wallace making that absurd comparison again, the implication being that the people who refuse to go along with the agenda here are the ones who are leading to disunity.
I think there are so many parallels to how much more difficult it is to do any of the things that anyone who has spoken today has done, to call the country to a higher purpose.
You've got politicians and prominent folks in the media outraged by steps that a president, not too many presidents after the one we heard from today, would try to save his country from an unthinkable death toll.
I mean, as many people die every two days as died on September 11th in this country, who don't have to die?
And yet there's no unity, no unity, no unity.
Why isn't there unity?
We all know why there's no unity.
And it's because the basic principles that used to unite the United States have gone the way of the dodo bird.
They were barely there even when Bush was president.
In fact, many of them crumbled while Bush was president.
And this is what's so frustrating, I think, to so many people on the right watching George W. Bush's speech and looking at many in the Republican establishment who seem to feel the same way as George W. Bush.
That unity is just around the corner.
If only I condemn this specific set of people, but not, broadly speaking, all people who commit these sorts of sins.
Like that?
It's playing right into the hands of people who actively use unity as a guise for a uniformity.
And again, I do find it galling that George W. Bush apparently only emerges to critique the perspectives of people he purports to see as on the right.
That is particularly galling to me.
Especially when you have the President of the United States who just destroyed George W. Bush's legacy in Afghanistan.
Let's be frank about this.
George W. Bush went into Afghanistan with uniformity of purpose.
There was uniformity.
One member of Congress voted against it.
Everyone wanted to go into Afghanistan.
Even Barack Obama in 2008 was calling it the good war.
In 2008.
And Joe Biden decided to pull out and hand the country directly back to the Taliban.
And then on the 20th anniversary of 9-11, he was talking about why he was right to do so and talking about and setting up these false binaries where, I mean, it's unbelievable.
He's in places like Shanksville.
He's meeting with he's meeting with first responders.
And he's talking about how, you know, we really have to be circumspect in how we fight al Qaeda.
If you had told anybody that we were going to spend 300 million bucks a day for 20 years to try to unite the country after we got bin Laden, after Al-Qaeda was wiped out there, can Al-Qaeda come back?
Yeah, but guess what?
It's already back other places.
What's the strategy?
Every place where Al-Qaeda is, we're going to invade and have troops there?
Come on!
Well, no.
The strategy is everywhere Al-Qaeda is, we're going to go in and we are going to kill them.
I mean, I thought that was literally the point of the war on terror.
The entire point of it.
That any place they were using as a base to threaten the United States, we were going to go in and kill them.
That was the basic idea of the war on terror.
And so all of this leads to Trump.
Because Trump isn't having this, right?
You want to know why Trump is durable in the Republican imagination?
The reason Trump is durable in the Republican imagination is because Trump is not having any of this bullcrap He's not going to sit around and pretend that Joe Biden is a unifying figure.
He's not going to make patty cake with the Obamas, who are highly polarizing figures in American political life.
He is not going to sit around and pretend that Joe Biden is some sort of figure of great magnanimity who simply wants us all to come together.
And so while normally it is sort of considered uncouth on 9-11 to talk about the failures of an administration currently in power, it becomes a lot less uncouth when you have an entire administration that has directed itself to destroying the purpose of the American response to 9-11.
So when Trump just doesn't operate inside the same sphere as the Republican establishment, the Republican establishment is still making nice and doing shoulder massages with the people who are using unity as a club, and Trump's like, I'm just not going to play that game.
You wonder why he's popular at the Republican base still?
That is the reason he is popular at the Republican base still.
Now he's not the only one who can do this.
There are other people on the right who are doing this as well.
You want to know why Ron DeSantis in Florida is popular with the Republican base?
It's because he does this with regard to COVID in the media all the time.
But the reason that Trump is popular with the Republican base is he is not going to pretend that he and Joe Biden are on the same page when it comes to things like Afghanistan.
It is somewhat mad.
Again, it is maddening to me that Joe Biden, who spent years backing the Afghanistan campaign under George W. Bush, but then simultaneously undermined Bush at every available turn.
20 years later destroys what's going on in Afghanistan.
By the way, everything going on with COVID, everything going on with the budget, it is all an attempt to distract from his failure in Afghanistan.
That is what this is.
It's why he's trying to ram it through.
And Trump wasn't having any of that.
So his presidential message, oh, it's not presidential.
Why couldn't it be presidential like Bush?
Maybe because he's being realistic, unlike Bush.
Here was Trump yesterday.
It is also a sad time for the way our war on those that did such harm to our country ended last week.
The loss of 13 great warriors and the many more who were wounded should never have happened.
The leader of our country was made to look like a fool, and that can never be allowed to happen.
It was caused by bad planning, incredible weakness, and leaders who truly didn't understand what was happening.
This is the 20th year of this war, and should have been a year of victory and honor and strength.
Instead, Joe Biden and his inept administration surrendered in defeat.
Okay, not only is he not wrong, he is correct about what time it is, as they say.
He is correct that we don't live in a world where unity of purpose is a thing.
And anybody on the left or on the right who tells you that unity of purpose in America is still a thing is missing the game.
They're missing the game that is being played.
In Afghanistan right now, the Taliban started flying their flag over the presidential palace in Kabul on the day of the 20th anniversary of 9-11.
The white banner with the Shahada, that's the testimony written across it, was raised at an 11 a.m.
ceremony on Saturday to mark the beginning of the work for the Taliban's caretaker government.
The Taliban did not issue a formal statement on the anniversary of the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks that preluded them being driven from power 20 years earlier, but the image of the flag was a stunning reminder, of course.
Meanwhile, The Biden administration, it now turns out, on their way out of Afghanistan, remember they had this quote-unquote successful drone attack to go after the ISIS members who perpetrated that terror attack that killed 13 Americans?
Well, it turns out that in all likelihood, according to the New York Times, they did in fact kill an Afghan translator and members of his family.
But they had no idea who they were hitting.
Is that unity?
The Taliban are going around literally beating women in the streets.
There's video of it emerging.
Is that unity?
Women are now in hiding all over Afghanistan.
And we're supposed to pretend that unity is just, it's just under the surface.
If only we could get at it.
If only!
And we're supposed to pretend that we don't know the reasons for the disunity.
We know the reasons for the disunity.
Don't gaslight the American people by telling them that we are all in favor of unity.
You are not.
You are not!
The folks on the hard left and in the Biden administration are not in favor of unity.
They don't want to explain what they're doing politically.
They don't want to explain why their policies are right.
They don't want to brook dissent.
They want to use the powers of the federal government to ram through anything that they can without regard for the constitutional process.
They want to do it in top-down fashion.
They want to completely rewrite the American national bargain.
And they want to castigate all of their opponents as inherently polarizing for things like Really, you're telling me I need to mask up my five-year-old?
The answer there is no.
Which is why, again, you want Trump, you're gonna get more of him.
This is how you're gonna get more of Trump.
And we'll get to the disunifying democratic budget campaign.
This is what they're pushing forward to.
It's a world-breaking budget campaign in just one second.
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Alrighty, as the legacy media continues to spread their propaganda in these really difficult times, it is important you have a source you can trust.
That is why we launched Morning Wire.
It's the daily morning news show dedicated to bringing you everything you need to know without any spin or hidden agenda.
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Also, you may have noticed that what is happening in America right now is the antithesis of what the founders sought.
The President of the United States has decided to go the authoritarian route and mandate vaccines for all businesses with over 100 employees or testing of all employees.
Or you gotta fire the employees.
That includes all of us here at The Daily Wire.
They're doing this not through the legislative process, not through the states.
They're doing this through OSHA.
And this is just administrative bureaucratic dictatorship.
We are not going to stand for that.
We're going to fight the mandate for our employees, for our freedom, and for you.
I'm pro-vaccine.
I'm anti these mandates.
I think they are a direct encroachment, a federal encroachment on the constitutional order.
We're pretty fired up about it.
That's why you should tune in to catch an all-new episode discussing what's happening and how we fight back at Backstage tomorrow with me, Jeremy Boring, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, and Andrew Klavan.
It streams tomorrow, 7 p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central on dailywire.com and On our YouTube channel, Daily Wire.
Don't miss it.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Meanwhile, these so-called unification Democrats are just seeking unity.
They love diversity of opinion.
I mean, it's just what they love.
They're seeking to ram through a world-breaking $3.5 trillion budget buster in the middle of a divisive news cycle with inflation at the highest rate for businesses since 2010.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a producer price index, which monitors changes in input prices for businesses and other domestic producers, rose 0.7 percent in August, slightly beating the 0.6 percent rate predicted by economists.
Inflation for businesses has now reached a year-over-year rate of 8.3 percent.
That's the metric's highest level since 2010.
And it's not just rising inflation.
It is also an economy that is pretty much crapping out.
As you'll recall, Joe Biden's employment statistics have been pretty dire.
He was supposed to hit 780,000 new jobs last month.
He hit instead about 235,000 new jobs last month.
But Democrats are pushing forward with their budget plan anyway.
This is a budget plan that is, as the New York Times described it, cradle to grave.
Here is what is in this $3.5 trillion plan.
Remember, this is on top of the $1.9 trillion we spent earlier this year and the $1.2 trillion, $1.1 trillion in these so-called infrastructure bipartisan bills.
So that means that if these things were all to pass this year, you'd be talking about a minimum of $6.5 trillion spent in this year, right?
Or at least passed in this year and spent over the next few years because there'll be more money spent next year.
So what exactly is in this package?
Well, it would be including paid family and medical leave, subsidized child care, an extension of the expanded child tax credit, universal pre-K for three and four-year-olds despite the failures of Head Start, two years of tuition-free community college.
It would also provide green cards to millions of immigrants.
You may have noticed that that has nothing to do with the budget.
Doesn't matter.
Democrats are going to shovel that crap in there as well, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It would also extend Expanded ACA subsidies, Obamacare subsidies, approved earlier this year in the COVID-19 aid package.
So we're just going to continue to expand emergency measures that were taken during COVID-19.
The plan would broaden Medicare benefits to cover now dental, vision, and hearing, and would aim to reduce the cost of prescription drugs by allowing Medicare to negotiate prices, among other steps.
Allowing Medicare to negotiate prices, of course, destroys all of the incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs in the United States in the first place.
Also, Democrats are proposing a series of ideas, including tax credits for clean energy investments, and a plan resembling a clean electricity standard aimed at reducing carbon emissions in the electricity sector by 80%.
Also, Democrats are proposing polluter import fees.
So how exactly are Democrats going to pay for all of this?
So, they released a plan yesterday.
Explaining how they are going to pay for all of this.
And the answer is they're going to raise taxes in a radical fashion that we have not seen for decades.
The House Democrats are now proposing a plan for $2.9 trillion in new taxes.
Notice that even though they're raising $2.9 trillion in new taxes, we're spending, as I said, $6.5 trillion approved in this year alone.
So it still doesn't pay for any of this nonsense.
And what exactly are they going to do?
Well, they're going to increase the top tax rate on Americans earning over $435,000 a year from 37% to 39.6%.
Also, there's going to be a 3% surcharge on top of that.
And then there's going to be an NIIT, which is a surcharge on top of that.
So the actual top tax bracket would go to 46% before any state taxes were actually applied, meaning that the actual state tax for people in the top income bracket in, say, California, would be nearly 60% on income.
It also calls for a new corporate tax rate of 26.5% for large profitable businesses up from the current rate of 21%.
This would put our corporate tax rate above China's.
So it'll be fun to watch all of the businesses rush and scurry for the exits and watch the job loss that comes along with that.
Many items in the new draft scale back the more ambitious tax increases sought by Biden earlier this year, but the ideas taken together amount to a significant unwinding of the tax cuts enacted by Republicans.
The draft tax also included some surprises, including an expected increase in the capital gains rate paid by investors to 25%.
So basically, you paid taxes on your income.
You then took that income and you put it in the stock market.
Now, they're going to tax any capital gains that you make from the stock market at 25%.
Which, of course, is going to hurt a lot of people who have, say, pensions in the stock market.
Biden's plan originally suggested approximately doubling the capital gains tax rate.
Also, they're, as I say, going to have that new surtax on quote-unquote high-income individuals.
Democrats are floating a tiered system for the corporate tax rate.
Only firms with incomes above $5 million would pay the new 26.5% rate.
Which, of course, is most businesses that hire a significant number of people in the United States.
Also, the proposal is going after new tobacco taxes.
So remember he said he was not going to raise taxes on people who are poor?
Yeah, that's not true.
Tobacco and nicotine taxes are directed at poor people because poor people in the United States disproportionately smoke.
That proposal calls for increasing taxes on tobacco and nicotine by roughly $100 billion, while also raising $16 billion from changing rules to, quote, treat cryptocurrency the same as other financial instruments.
So they're going to crack down on cryptocurrency?
Of course they are.
They have to crack down on cryptocurrency.
The reason they're cracking down on crypto is because crypto is a way for people to escape the predations of the federal government inflating its own currency.
The next step, presumably, will be for the federal government to create a Fedcoin, to create its own sort of digital currency, and then the federal government will take its benefits and it will directly deposit them into your bank account, and then will charge you a negative interest rate.
So they'll just force you to spend it, basically.
They'll do fiscal policy directly into your bank account.
That is the next step with a Fedcoin.
So in order to do that, they have to kill crypto.
That is their actual goal here.
So this is the House Democrats tax plan.
If Democrats get their way, they're going to radically increase taxes and that will have a dire effect on the economy.
Meanwhile, Democrats are hurtling toward a debt ceiling fight.
It turns out there are some rank-and-file Democrats who are not going to vote for increasing the debt ceiling unless they get a bigger spending bill.
According to Politico, Democrats' threadbare majorities in Congress are leaving the party with little time to wriggle out of a dangerous economic morass that could overwhelm other priorities, from voting rights to tax increases on the wealthy to a sweeping expansion of the social safety net.
Top Democrats say they have a plan, but they don't want to talk about it yet.
Government funding runs out in 18 days, according to Politico.
The Biden administration says the debt ceiling must be raised shortly after that.
Senate Republicans say that they are not voting for it.
The House also doesn't come back until September 20th.
So this means that you're going to see the progressives now try to hold up the quote-unquote bipartisan infrastructure plan in order to get the $3.5 trillion plan.
This has turned into a fight between the progressive wing and Joe Manchin.
Joe Manchin yesterday said, to his credit, he's not going to support this $3.5 trillion boondoggle.
The realistic number is more like $1.5 trillion.
He's moving, quote, full speed ahead with this package.
Will he have your vote?
And that's fine.
He can't.
He will not have my vote on 3.5, and Chuck knows that.
But what's the overall number for the budget bill?
I think that you're going to have to look at it and find out what you're able to do through a reasonable, responsible way.
So then how do you know that it's not 3.5?
If it's going to be at 1, 1.5, we don't know where it's going to be.
So you think ballpark 1, 1.5?
It's not going to be at 3.5, I can assure you.
Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders going directly after Joe Manchin and trying to take him out.
Here's Bernie Sanders saying, well, if you won't pass our $3.5 trillion plan, then we're not going to pass your $1.1 trillion infrastructure bill that's bipartisan.
Your colleague, Joe Manchin, just explicitly told me, repeatedly, he will not support your $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill.
He wants to see something more in the ballpark of $1.5 trillion.
Is that acceptable to you?
No, it's absolutely not acceptable to me.
I don't think it's acceptable to the president, to the American people, or to the overwhelming majority of the people in the Democratic caucus.
Okay, so that infighting will be fascinating to watch.
But again, it is indicative of the fact that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which now has control over the Democratic Party, is moving radically to the left.
So it calls for unity.
Would that sort of move, I think, Overstated, to say the very, very least.
All right, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Mills Show.
Today, he discusses the UK reversing plans for vaccine passports.
You can hear more details about that story over on Michael's Show.
That's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
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A new study shows that teen boys are 6.1 times as likely to face danger from the vaccine as from COVID.
An ex-Special Forces dude beats up a chick to wild applause.
And George W. Bush compares the horn guy at the Capitol to al-Qaeda terrorists.
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