The Democratic Progressive vs. Moderate War Is On | Ep. 1344
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Progressives threaten to kill the bipartisan infrastructure bill unless moderates go along with their budget-busting plans.
Joe Biden sneaks a massive fine into the Democratic budget bill for businesses that don't force vaccines on their workers.
And the Biden military infrastructure finally admits Joe Biden's enormous Afghanistan screw-up.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so today is supposedly zero hour.
Nancy Pelosi has said that she's going to bring up for a vote a bipartisan infrastructure package.
There's only one problem, which is that she probably does not have the vote.
According to the New York Times, Democrats prepared legislation on Wednesday to avert a government shutdown this week.
But they're desperately trying to salvage President Biden's domestic agenda as conservative-leaning holdouts dug in against an ambitious $3.5 trillion social safety net and climate bill that carries many of the party's top priorities.
Always gotta love the New York Times for that unbiased journalism.
They're conservative-leaning holdouts, right?
They're not moderates.
Now they're conservative-leaning.
If you just oppose spending $3.5 trillion randomly for no reason, this makes you a conservative now.
Which, good to know, means much more than half the country is conservative, presumably.
Congressional leaders move to address the most immediate threat, working to complete a bill to prevent a government funding elapse at Thursday and midnight.
But after days of intensive negotiations to bridge bitter differences in their party over Biden's two biggest legislative priorities, the president and top Democrats appeared as far as ever from an agreement on their marquee social policy package, which the White House calls the Build Back Better Plan, which in turn was imperiling a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that was scheduled for a House vote on Thursday.
So remember, what we have here is a failure to understand what is going on by either side of the political aisle within the Democratic side of the house.
You got the progressives.
And the progressives are basically now threatening to shoot the hostage.
Here's the progressive plan, which makes no sense at all.
The moderates in the Senate want a bipartisan infrastructure bill.
We will not pass your bipartisan infrastructure bill unless you vow to vote for this $3.5 trillion budget bill that you have said you're not going to vote for.
So if the bipartisan infrastructure bill comes up for passage, we're going to vote against it, knowing that will then kill Our budget bills.
We want both of them brought up at the same time and both voted for, or we're not going to vote for your bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Meanwhile, Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema, along with a few moderates in the House, have said, we're not big on this $3.5 trillion bill, and if you bring them both up at the same time, we will vote the budget bill down.
So Democrats are having a very difficult time bridging this gap and Joe Biden has provided no leadership because, of course, Joe Biden is not alive.
So that is a major problem.
Joe Biden's lack of aliveness is actually kind of it's kind of stunning here because the people he should be pressuring are the progressive wing of his party.
He's utterly incapable of standing up to the progressive wing of his party.
This should be a shock to anybody who watched politics over the course of the last couple of years.
Remember, Joe Biden ran against Bernie Sanders in the primaries.
Bernie Sanders was the guy who was coming out of New Hampshire most likely to win the Democratic Party nomination.
And then the entire Democratic Party infrastructure mobilized, and Joe Biden won South Carolina, and then he swept through the rest of the primaries, wiping Sanders off the board.
And he did so specifically because people were very scared of both Sanders and his wildly left-wing agenda.
So Joe Biden swept him, right?
And then he sort of ate his agenda.
And the Sanders agenda became the Biden agenda, to the point where Bernie Sanders is now basically driving the boat.
Bernie Sanders is essentially telling House progressives to vote down the bipartisan infrastructure bill unless he gets the $3.5 trillion bill.
Here is Bernie Sanders doing just that yesterday.
My fear is that if the dual agreement that was reached is broken and we just pass the infrastructure bill, the leverage that we have here in the Senate to pass the reconciliation bill will be largely gone.
I think the one hope we have is to say, look, if you guys want to pass the infrastructure bill, I want to pass it.
You want to pass that?
You're going to have to deal with reconciliation.
You can't just keep slow walking this thing.
Okay, when the Democratic Party is relying on Bernie Sanders for their negotiation strategy, they're out of their minds.
Bernie Sanders has not been at the head of a major piece of legislation for his entire career, and the man's been in the Senate since Cato was in the Senate.
Okay, the man has been in American government since well before the foundation of the United States Republic.
And yet he still never passed a major piece of legislation.
Why?
Because he is a useless dullard when it comes to actually negotiating deals with even members of his own party.
Until five minutes ago, Bernie Sanders was considered a radical.
Now he's actually leading the party.
It's kind of an astonishing thing.
And Joe Biden is just sitting there caving into it, which has put Nancy Pelosi in a rather awkward position because On the one hand, she wants this bipartisan infrastructure bill so that Biden has something to tout for the midterms.
On the other hand, she knows that she may not get the bipartisan infrastructure bill unless she forces the moderates to vote in favor of a budget bill.
And she ain't getting control of the Senate in the first place.
So Democrats are trying to bring pressure to bear on Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate.
Now, before we even get to the negotiations between Democrats over the bill, I think it is worthwhile noting a couple of things.
One, Right now, the American economy is sort of on the brink.
This was not supposed to happen.
It was not supposed to happen.
Remember, coming out of COVID, right, as of January, the expectations were the United States economy was going to grow maybe double digits this year.
It was going to certainly be somewhere between 7% and 10% in terms of GDP growth.
It was going to blow out all estimates.
Instead, you have a shockingly slow economy for what should be happening right now.
You have people who are not coming back to work.
You have record rates of inflation.
And now you have consumer confidence hitting a seven-month low.
According to CNBC, U.S.
consumer confidence fell to a seven-month low in September as a relentless rise in COVID-19 cases deepened concerns about the economy's near-term prospects, fitting in with expectations for a slowdown in growth in the third quarter.
Now, remember, the entire media and the Biden administration are trying to convince you of two things.
The reason for the economic slowdown is not because of Joe Biden's fiscal policy, and it is also not because of Joe Biden's COVID policy.
The answer is it is because of both.
The reason you are having an economic slowdown is because the Biden administration has been focused solely and completely on blowing money into an economy and paying people to stay home, which limits supply and drives up prices.
It creates inflation that is currently outpacing whatever wage increases people are seeing.
Inflation rates outpacing wage inflation is called wage suppression.
OK, that's actually what is happening under Joe Biden.
Your wages are not going as far as they would have earlier because of the inflation rates that have been connected to nearly every product.
And that is a specific result of Joe Biden's loose fiscal policy, which he has been pushing to the Federal Reserve, as well as Joe Biden's extraordinarily loose spending policy, in which he just wants to continue to blow trillions of dollars into the economy, demonstrating once again the shortcomings of demand-side economics.
The Keynesian notion that if you just keep pushing money into the economy, no matter what, just ram it in there, that suddenly the economy will be healthier, as opposed to you're taking out useless debt and redistributing wealth to a bunch of garbage programs that are essentially going to accomplish the precise reverse of what they seek to accomplish.
Okay, that is problem number one.
Problem number two is that Joe Biden suggested he was going to end COVID.
And here is the thing.
COVID, for all intents and purposes, when it comes to government policy, now when it comes to the impact of COVID, Because the impact of lots of things in life is not under the control of government.
COVID is over when it comes to government policy.
The reason COVID is over when it comes to government policy is we now have vaccines.
This has been true since literally February.
Since February, it has been true that if you were able to get a vaccine and you got the vaccine and you were double dosed, you were good to go.
And Joe Biden was never able to let go of the zero COVID idea.
And so we are going to be stuck in this morass for a very long time.
Joe Biden wishes you to believe That the Delta surge that we saw in the South is responsible for the bad economic showing of his economy over the last quarter or so.
The reality is that those states in the South are growing faster than the states in the North where they did not see a Delta surge.
And the reason for that is because down South, a lot of people were like, okay, if I'm vaccinated, I get to go back to work.
And if I'm unvaccinated and unworried, and if I get it, that one's on me.
That's COVID policy.
That's not COVID itself.
Just as the dramatic destruction of the American economy last year was in large part due to the policy response to COVID, not COVID itself.
Right now, that is 100% true.
It used to be maybe 60% true because COVID was still pretty dangerous last year.
There was no good solution to it.
If you were younger and you were healthier, maybe you could wear a mask and go back to work and still feel somewhat secure.
But now that vaccines are available, COVID public policy's role is basically over, but Joe Biden insists that COVID public policy be at the top of the heap.
So, the destruction of the American economy that is happening right now, the attempt to ram through spending combined with bad COVID policy is leading to economic stagnation and inflation.
You're getting the stagflation of Jimmy Carter beginning right now.
Now, the economy is still growing.
It's not that it has gone into full-scale recession the way that it was during some of Jimmy Carter's term.
But there's a high likelihood that you could see something like that happen in the very near future because blue states are still locked down and Joe Biden wants to ram all this stuff through.
So that is the predicate to these negotiations, which again, are over a massive spending package that is not going to make things better.
It's going to make things a lot, lot worse.
Because in a second, I'm going to get to what is actually in these packages.
And the Biden administration is just lying to you.
They're just lying to you.
But this is all about Always and forever is make more Americans dependent on government, so that more Americans will vote for Democrats, so that more Americans can be dependent on government, and we can move slowly toward the social democratic systems of Sweden or Norway, and we can slowly decline as a world superpower, as the world's economic leader, and we can become sort of a second-rate European nation.
That's sort of the goal here.
Okay?
And then we'll all be comfortable, because equality will have been reached.
Of course, America, by the way, with the Swedish system, does not look like Sweden.
The reason for that is because America is not Sweden.
And to try and simply transplant all of the economic institutions of Sweden to the United States would be radically unsuccessful in a wide variety of ways.
You cannot just take, you know, the same way you can't just take American-style republicanism and just drop it into Afghanistan and say it's gonna work here.
You can't just take all of the governmental systems that are in place in places like Sweden and Norway where they have very high levels of cultural homogeneity, where they have extraordinarily high levels of social fabric.
You can't take all that stuff and just drop it in the United States and expect that it's going to work exactly the same way because it absolutely will not.
It is worth noting that when you look at Sweden and Norway, their life expectancy outpaced the United States before they had any of these socialistic systems in place over there.
As of the 1930s and 40s, they were still outpacing American life expectancy by about the same amount as they currently outpace American life expectancy, for example.
And conversely, if you take Swedish-Americans or Nordic-Americans and you measure their incomes in the United States versus Sweden or Norway, they're much higher in the United States.
So we'll get to what's actually in these bills in just one second.
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Okay, so what exactly is in this bill?
First of all, Democrats are lying.
It is not, in fact, a 3.5 trillion dollar bill.
It is, in fact, a 5 to 5.5 trillion dollar bill.
The reason for that is because they're using a bunch of budget tricks, as the Wall Street Journal has pointed out.
Here's what the Wall Street Journal pointed out just a couple of days ago.
The child allowance, which is among the bill's most expensive provisions, extends the $3,000 to $3,600 per child payments for a decade.
It would cost $1.1 trillion.
But Democrats hid the real cost.
Why?
They extended that allowance only through 2025.
So they're lying.
They're saying that this hugely expensive provision is going to sunset in 2025.
Who thinks that this provision is actually going to sunset in 2025?
Have you ever met a government program that has actually sunsetted?
It doesn't happen.
Government programs, as Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, are the only thing in life that is guaranteed to have everlasting life.
If you're searching for the fountain of immortality, if you're searching for the fountain of youth and immortality, there is no better place to find it than in a government program.
Democrats are also using a different time shift to disguise the cost of their Medicare expansion, says the Wall Street Journal.
New vision and hearing benefits would kick in over the next few years and cost about $20 billion a year.
But Democrats are delaying the phase-in of the dental benefit to 2028.
Which, quote-unquote, saves $420 billion over 10 years.
But then, it phases in in 2028, and boom!
Huge new costs, which are not taken into account, because when you actually measure the cost of the bill, you do it over a 10-year period.
So all you have to do is set a time bomb off to go off in year 9, and then none of the costs are measured in that 10-year period.
Then there's the new Universal Child Care Entitlement, which gives $90 billion to the states, but only from 2022 to 2027.
The bill limits household costs to a share of income on the sliding scale.
None would pay more than 7% of income, no matter how much they earn or how many children they have.
What happens when that $90 billion runs out, which could occur before 2027?
Well, the bill then automatically appropriates such sums as may be necessary for each of the fiscal years 2025 through 2027.
Democrats are also charging states with standing up a universal pre-K entitlement, which would start next year and run through 2028.
Biden's budget projects this new entitlement will cost $33 billion a year if fully phased in.
Initially, the Feds would pick up 100% of the cost, but then, Washington's share is supposed to decline to 60% by 2028.
Okay, so that means it's a federal cost, and then it lowers.
Where does the rest of the cost go?
To the state!
So you get to pay higher taxes at the state.
You're the same person paying state taxes and federal taxes.
If they shift the cost from the federal government to the state government, you still end up paying the taxes.
You just end up doing it to the state as opposed to the federal government.
Democrats are also going to pay 100% of average state tuition and fees for students at community colleges in 2023, but 80% by 2027.
But states are going to want to increase their community college enrollment, so they're going to start picking up the tab.
So bottom line is, it is not $3.5 trillion.
It looks more like $5 trillion to $5.5 trillion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
And it's not just that.
This bill is a massive entitlement program for a lot of people who, by the way, are not quote-unquote struggling or trying to get by or who are poverty stricken.
The Expanded Child Tax Credit, as the Wall Street Journal points out, has become a monthly government check that transfers large sums of money from childless taxpayers to financially secure middle-class families.
The allowance is now $3,600 per child under age 6, $3,000 for ages 6 through 17.
A married couple making $150,000 a year with four kids would qualify for $13,200 a year.
of six through 17. A married couple making 150 grand a year with four kids would qualify for $13,200 a year. The credits do phase out with income, but the same family earning $400,000 can still get up to $8,000 a year. And then Biden says we need to tax all those people.
people.
A new entitlement caps childcare costs at 7% of income.
Initially, that was limited to parents making 200% of the state's median income.
So the idea was that if you were paying 8% of your income for childcare, then we would have the government subsidize the other 1%, for example.
And that was supposed to cap at like 200% of the median income.
So if your state's median income is $60,000 or $50,000, you're talking about like $100,000 or $120,000.
Progressives got rid of the cap.
So now it covers everybody.
The U.S.
median income for a family of four is now about $90,000.
Those families would pay 2% of income annually for childcare, $1,800.
Taxpayers would pay the rest.
That's $21,000 for two kids in daycare, according to estimates by the Heritage Foundation.
In wealthy states, a family of four earning $200,000 a year could receive $23,000.
Democrats also want paid family leave.
About two-thirds of average wages for up to 12 weeks a year for any family care.
And it would apply to both part and full-time employees.
And in the case of newborns, both parents are entitled to leave.
So it's not maternity care.
It's both.
Right?
So my wife and I get to take off 12 weeks and get two-thirds of our salary paid.
This means a married couple with a newborn, each earning $200,000, could collect more than $1,000 in weekly benefits each, resulting in $24,000 of paid leave in one year. A couple making $100,000 each would each be eligible for roughly the same amount.
Democrats are also expanding Obamacare, and they are expanding it downward in terms of who it is applicable to.
The bill includes an electric tax credit for $12,500, which is a huge chunk.
By the way, you see a lot of poverty-stricken people driving around electric vehicles, driving around those Teslas, do you?
Who do you think that tax credit's going to go to?
And then of course Nancy Pelosi wants to exempt all of her blue state friends from the consequences of their own foolish fiscal actions.
She wants to replace the state and local tax deduction.
So you'll recall that the Trump tax bill got rid of you being able to deduct your state taxes against your federal taxes because that was really a cheap and easy way for Democrats to basically subsidize blue states.
If you had a 13% state tax rate in California, you could deduct before Trump's tax plan, Your state taxes before looking at your top line income and then paying your federal income based on that.
Trump got rid of that.
So you use the same top line income for both your federal taxes and your state taxes.
Because otherwise what you're basically doing is you are benefiting all of the states that have high state tax rates while penalizing states like Florida that have a 0% state tax rate.
Nancy Pelosi wants to replace that specifically in order to benefit her blue state friends.
This bill is a boondoggle.
Everybody knows that it's a boondoggle.
And so Democrats are going to try and convince you that the dollar cost on this is zero.
I mean, this is an audacious lie.
Now, the real reason Democrats are telling this lie, you've seen Joe Biden tell it, you've seen Chuck Schumer tell it, now you're seeing Nancy Pelosi tell it, the cost of this bill is zero.
The reason they're saying this is because they understand that the Republicans are saying, we're not going to raise the debt ceiling while you blow out the spending.
And so Democrats are like, they're two separate issues.
Our new spending is not even going to raise the debt.
Number one, it will.
And number two, when you say that it is cost free or that it costs zero dollars, that is lying.
Here's Nancy Pelosi.
The president is negotiating, as is well known.
I keep reading it in the Daily Metropolitan Journal about that.
And it is what is happening.
And we're hoping that we can come to a place.
It's not about a dollar amount.
The dollar amount, as the president said, is zero.
This bill will be paid for.
It's about what are the values that we share The dollar amount is zero.
This is the line they're actually going to go with.
The dollar amount is zero.
Joe Biden tweeted out the other day that instead of wasting money on tax cuts, we could be making investments.
All of this is a perversion of the English language.
It's the equivalent of the Democrats telling you, okay, Nancy Pelosi's walking down the street, wallet's hanging out of your back pocket.
She just steals your wallet.
And in your wallet's 100 bucks.
She says, I could give you back this $20, but that would be wasting money.
Instead, I'm going to take this $100 and I'm going to spend it essentially buying votes.
I'm going to call that an investment.
So the choices are, I can waste money by giving you back some of your money and still stealing the rest, or I can spend all of it on random garbage that basically helps me electorally, and I will call that an investment.
This is the plan.
This is their big plan.
Now, here's the thing.
Democrats are kind of jacked either way.
If they don't pass this thing, they look incompetent.
If they do pass this thing, the consequences fiscally for the future are pretty dire.
They are not good.
Joe Biden doesn't care because he doesn't have any long-term vision.
John Maynard Keynes once said, in the long run, we're all dead.
Well, for Joe Biden, it ain't the long run.
He understands that his legacy is very much tied to what happens right here, but he's not really leveraging any bit of his presidential power to get the progressives to fall in line and at least get something done here, which is kind of astonishing.
All of this is predicate to the fight between the progressives and the moderates.
The media are all on the side of the progressives.
So, the progressives are very, very angry at Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, because Kyrsten Sinema is in a purple state.
And so, Kyrsten Sinema Refuses to go along with this $3.5 trillion budget boondoggle.
Same thing with Joe Manchin, who's in the reddest state in America.
He's refusing to go along with it as well.
And the progressives are saying, we will kill your dreams of this bipartisan infrastructure bill if you don't give us what we want on the budget.
So they are just basically threatening to do something that will not result in what they want.
If they shoot the hostage, they don't get anything.
I mean, they have no leverage over Manchin and Sinema in any real way here.
They're trying to do it anyway.
According to Politico, it is an article of faith among most Democrats that progressives will always cave to their more centrist colleagues when the time comes to vote on major legislation.
And yet, on the brink of a historic bout of congressional chaos, the exact opposite appears to be happening.
Over the past few days, the left has been galvanized by the idea of voting down the bipartisan infrastructure package unless their moderate counterparts first provide some commitments on the party-line social spending and climate bill.
That sentiment could change at any moment, but there's one reason it might not.
Instead of facing the usual chastisement from prominent Democratic-leaning pundits, progressives are being cheered on for their intemperance.
Yup.
So you have Jamal Bowie of the New York Times tweeting his endorsement either both bills pass or neither does.
Okay, honestly, like, go for it, man.
Cut off that nose to spite your face.
I'm into it.
For progressives, it's been lovely, if a bit bewildering, to watch.
It's a beautiful sight, said Rebecca Katz, a longtime progressive operative.
This is the most together they've been.
I mean, I can't remember the last time we've seen something like this.
I've been retweeting Jonathan Chait and Hillary Clinton people today.
It's very confusing.
Well, it's not really confusing because you have to understand the Democrats see the prospects of them being able to do anything at all beyond next year's elections as basically gone.
And so it's get things done while the getting is good.
And so when they look at Manchin and Sinema, who both wish to hold their seats, Instead of saying to themselves, you know what?
A little bit of incrementalism might go a long way.
They've said we are going to go for broke.
Now, maybe this comes from just an outside sense of confidence in the aftermath of Biden's victory.
There's an outside sense of confidence among Democrats after 2012 that they would never lose an election again.
And then, of course, they lost the election of 2016.
The Democrats seem to have the same feeling in 2020.
And then 2022 is going to happen.
If they were not quite so confident, they might have approached this in some sort of incremental fashion.
Pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill, come back to another bill that's two trillion dollars, probably get that.
Instead, they've decided to go for broke because they feel like if we don't do something big and splashy right now, then how can we hold our heads high even as we enter minority status?
And so they are very, very angry at Kyrsten Sinema.
So, according to the New York Times, Kyrsten Sinema is at the center of it all.
Some Arizonans wish she weren't.
Well, there's only one problem.
Kyrsten Sinema still holds 56% approval rating among Democrats in Arizona.
So, she's doing fine.
But the New York Times is trying to press cinema.
And the media, our journal activists, are trying to push these Democratic moderates into abandoning their positions.
This is why every 30 seconds for the last seven months, eight months, nine months, they've been asking Mansion and Cinema whether they are going to kill the filibuster.
And every 30 seconds, Mansion and Cinema are like, nope.
And so the media come back 30 seconds later, like, have you changed your mind yet?
They're like, my kid's in the car on the way to Disneyland.
No, we're not there yet.
No, we're not there yet.
Okay, Mansion and Cinema are not going to get there.
According to the New York Times, when Ms.
Sinema famously gave a thumbs down to a $15 minimum wage and refused to eliminate the filibuster to pass new voting rights laws this year, Jade Duran, a Democrat and biomedical engineer from Phoenix, decided she was fed up.
She joined dozens of liberal voters and civil rights activists in a rolling series of protests outside Ms.
Sinema's Phoenix offices, which have been taking place since the summer.
Nearly 50 people have been arrested.
It really feels like she doesn't care about her voters, said Ms.
Duran, 33, who was arrested in July at a protest.
I will never vote for her again.
Well, there's only one problem, which, of course, is that if she had the Green Party activists backing her, then she probably would not be able to win in Arizona.
Remember, Kyrsten Sinema very narrowly won her seat.
She was not supposed to win her seat because of all of her bad old comments about everything ranging from the war in Afghanistan to LGBT issues and then there was she won and now she's turned out to be one of the more moderate members of the Senate and so she will probably hold her seat or at least she has a very good shot of holding her seat.
But according to the New York Times, she's facing a growing political revolt at home from the voters who once counted themselves among her most devoted supporters.
She doesn't care.
The reason she doesn't care is because these are not the people who are going to make or break her.
See, Sinema understands something that Joe Biden clearly doesn't, which is where her bread is buttered.
Her bread is not buttered by the people who are protesting outside her office.
Her bread is buttered by the people who are the swing voters in the state of Arizona.
I mean, frankly, I hope that the progressives get their way and they knock over Sinema and they nominate somebody who's really radical and then they lose the seat.
That would be good.
That's fine with me.
But it's amazing to watch as the radical left goes after Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin as well.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let's talk about the fact you don't want to go to the auto parts store because who wants to go to the auto parts store?
Like, what the hell's the point?
You stand there for a really long time, finally get to the front of the line, and then there's some guy who really doesn't know what he's talking about, and he stands there.
He has to call his manager because you need a specific part, and he's like, bro, we don't have it.
It's out of stock.
It turns out Beto O'Rourke's behind the counter.
He's like, yeah, I've got to order it.
Yeah, bro.
And you're like, um, when will it be in?
Two weeks.
It'll cost you $300 extra.
Okay.
Or I could just go online at rockauto.com at home and just do this myself.
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Write Shapiro in their how-did-you-hear-about-us box so they know that we sent you.
Alrighty, so...
The progressive wing has been assailing Kyrsten Sinema.
Apparently in the odd belief that if they please Mehdi Hassan on MSNBC, that somehow this is going to get Kyrsten Sinema to change her mind, which is really, really dumb.
Honestly, it's the equivalent of people fulminating on Fox News about Susan Collins.
I can fulminate as much as I want about Susan Collins.
Susan Collins ain't listening to me.
Susan Collins has her set of voters.
She's not particularly interested in what those of us on the quote-unquote hard right have to say.
It's the same thing when it comes to Cori Bush ripping on Kyrsten.
What in the world would Kyrsten Sinema care about Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist and adjunct member of the squad?
Why would she possibly care?
But it's great virtue signaling time for Cori Bush.
It is sickening to me that there are people who will just Uh, push aside those that need these deep housing investments.
What we're talking about is saving lives right now.
We need the, we need that prescription drug reform and to say, Oh, you know what?
You can continue to have to worry about whether you're going to pay your rent or, or, or get the, um, the lifesaving medications that you need, because you know what?
My donors are the ones who have me here.
You know, it's sickening, but I am.
I'm speaking to her humanity and I hope she hears me.
It's sickening.
I'm speaking out for humanity.
She's evil.
She wants people not to have homes.
I hope she listens to me.
Yeah.
Strategic acumen there from Cori Bush.
Just brilliant, brilliant stuff.
Mehdi Hassan.
He tweeted out this very powerful stuff.
Very powerful.
Yes, I'm sure it's very powerful.
In doing nothing.
Congratulations there.
Ro Khanna, who's been a guest on the program.
Very nice guy.
Ro Khanna.
He did the same thing on MSNBC with the inimitable Joy Reid.
Here we go.
Why did Senator Sinema create this deadline that if we don't do something on Thursday, I'm going to walk?
I mean, who legislates like that?
She's a first-term senator.
I mean, as a first-term member of the Congress, or even a third-term member of Congress, if I said, if I'm not going to get my way, I'm going to walk, the Speaker would laugh at me.
Understandably.
Politics is a team sport.
And at the end of the day, we have to act on behalf of the American public and we have to understand we have a president, President Biden.
We have a Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader.
They've been there for many years.
They have experience.
We can disagree, but have some respect and have some sense that there is a coach and someone's in charge of the team.
But no, nobody is in charge of the team.
They have 50 seats in the Senate.
50 plus 1.
That's it.
Okay, that means that every single senator is the swing vote for the Democrats.
And by the way, if Ro Khanna were the swing vote in the House, he'd be using that power the same way the progressives are.
The progressives are using their power right now to hold up the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Why does the logic only work one way?
So the Democrats are getting desperate.
Dick Durbin, the senator from Illinois, is like, just name your price!
Just tell us what you want, please!
Okay, here's the thing.
Manchin and Sinema said what they wanted, and then the progressives in the House are the ones holding it up.
But it is amazing how nobody in the Democratic Party will just say boo to the progressives.
Nobody will say, listen, it is your responsibility to vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill that is widely popular, and then we'll talk about this $3.5 trillion bill.
Right?
Nobody will say this to them because they're so scared crapless of their progressive wing, which is why they are in serious trouble here.
I think we've shown a lot of respect to our colleagues who obviously have a different point of view when it comes to reconciliation.
There's been meaningful negotiation that's gone on for weeks.
The president has been involved personally.
I've never seen a president engaged this way since Barack Obama's days with the Affordable Care Act.
So we're all in, all aboard.
Now it's time, I would say for both senators, make your mark and close the deal.
What is it that you want?
What is your final goal?
It's time to stop talking around it and speak directly to it.
Um, what do they want?
They've made very clear what they want.
In fact, Joe Manchin, I mean, I could say that Joe Manchin put out like a very long statement explaining precisely what he wants.
Manchin said quote, Every member of Congress has a solemn duty to vote for what they believe is best for the country and the American people, not their party.
Respectfully, as I've said for months, I can't support $3.5 trillion more in spending when we already have spent $5.4 trillion since last March.
At some point, all of us, regardless of party, must ask a simple question.
How much is enough?
By the way, he's not wrong.
Unemployment rates rose.
The unemployment filings, again, rose for the third straight week to $362,000 this week.
Why?
Because you're paying people to stay home.
Because you're inflating the currency.
Because you're inflating the prices.
Because you're doing a terrible job.
And your solution to this?
Is to blow more money into this economy?
Manchin said, Proposing a historic expansion of social programs while ignoring the fact we are not in a recession and that millions of jobs remain open will only feed a dysfunction that could weaken our economic recovery.
This is the shared reality we all now face.
And it is this reality that must shape the future decisions we as elected leaders must make.
And then he talked about how careless spending was going to make things worse.
He says, Since the beginning of this reconciliation debate, I've been consistent in my belief any expansion of social programs must be targeted to those in need, not expanded beyond what is fiscally possible.
Our tax code should be reformed to fix the flaws of the 2017 tax bill and ensure everyone pays their fair share, but it should not weaken our global competitiveness or the ability of millions of small businesses to compete with the Amazons of the world.
Overall, the amount we spend now must be balanced with what we need and can afford, not designed to re-engineer the social and economic fabric of this nation or vengefully taxed for the sake of wishful spending.
In August, says Joe Manchin, I recommended we take a strategic pause to provide time to develop the right policies and to continue to monitor how the pandemic and economic factors are affecting our nation's fiscal situation before we spend more.
Throughout September, I've made it clear to all those who would listen the needs to means test any new social programs who are helping those who need it the most, not spending for the sake of spending.
While I am hopeful that common ground can be found that would result in another historic investment in the nation, I cannot and will not support trillions in spending or an all-or-nothing approach that ignores the brutal fiscal reality our nation faces.
There is a better way.
I believe we can find it if we're willing to continue to negotiate in good faith.
If there's one final lesson that will continue to guide me in this difficult debate, it's this.
America's a great nation, but great nations have been weakened by careless spending and bad policies.
That is a pretty obvious not doing this from Joe Manchin.
By the way, he then doubled down on that.
And he said, I'm not going to vote for this bill if it doesn't have the Hyde Amendment in it.
So Democrats have stripped out the Hyde Amendment, which is federal funding for abortion.
He was asked about this by National Review.
And he said, that's dead on arrival if they take out the Hyde Amendment.
And so, meanwhile, Kristen Sinema, right, who's being bashed about, I will say, she's a snarkfest, Kristen Sinema.
She's pretty hilarious.
So, Sinema, apparently, was asked by Frank Thorpe, a reporter with NBC News, about all of this.
She said, the reporter said, what do you say to progressives who are frustrated they don't know where you are?
And Sinema said, I'm in the Senate.
And Thorpe said, there are progressives in the Senate that are also frustrated they don't know where you are either.
Okay, here's the thing.
The progressives know exactly where she is.
That's her point.
Her point is, I'm right here.
I'm in the Senate, and guess who I'm not answerable to?
Progressives in the House.
Progressives in the House.
Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get to Joe Biden's COVID policy, which again, If there are two reasons why the economy is stagnating right now, it is his fiscal policy and it is his COVID policy, and they are not disconnected.
We'll get to more on that in just one second.
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Alright, we're gonna get to more in just one second.
Joe Biden doubling down on his garbage COVID policies.
and as a Nancy GER on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
All right, we're going to get to more in just one second.
Joe Biden doubling down on his garbage COVID policies.
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So as I've said, Joe Biden's economy is not doing well.
Okay.
It should be booming right now.
Remember, before he took office, I said that Joe Biden had been handed just a world of joy.
Right, really, he had, because we had a vaccine.
The vaccine was gonna be put out there.
Millions of people were gonna get it.
A lot of people were gonna be immune.
We were reaching the end of the pandemic.
The artificial destruction of the economy in 2020 was going to simply go away, and we were gonna have massive economic growth for the next two years.
This was my prediction.
Joe Biden has somehow singularly screwed up all of that inside of nine months.
and then added on top of that an Afghanistan disaster to boot. So the other half of the fiscal policy disaster that is the Biden administration is the COVID policy disaster that is the Biden administration. And much of that has to do with the attitude that Joe Biden has taken toward public policy with regard to COVID.
Now, here's the reality.
The COVID vaccines are extremely effective in preventing hospitalization and death.
If you're above the age of 65, then you probably should consider getting a booster.
That is not a huge deal.
The fact is that it usually takes a couple of rounds of MMR in order for your kids to be immune to MMR.
So is that the end of the world?
Does that prove the vaccines are ineffective?
No, it doesn't.
Okay, and the reality is even if you don't get a booster, these vaccines remain highly effective against hospitalization and particularly against death.
And that's been true, yes, including places like Israel.
The reason so many people who are vaccinated have been hospitalized in Israel is because pretty much everybody in Israel has been vaccinated.
Okay, so you're getting, like, the most vulnerable people who have been vaccinated.
Maybe a fraction of those people are getting really ill.
Okay, so the vaccines are super effective, which means once you've had the choice to take the vaccine or not take the vaccine, it really is nobody else's business, unless you are in the situation in which so many people have chosen not to take the vaccine that it is overwhelming the hospital, and then you're back in sort of the situation that you had at the beginning of the pandemic.
Where in order to avoid unnecessary death at the hospitals because of lack of resources, you need to have things like mask mandates or lockdowns or something, right?
That was the same logic that was originally used in March of 2020.
But, so long as the hospitals are not being overwhelmed, this pandemic, in terms of public policy, is essentially over.
Not in terms of damage to people, in terms of public policy.
Joe Biden cannot accept that.
Because Joe Biden set himself a goal that is unachievable.
And he's making the unachievability of that goal core to his entire program.
I mean, he was asked over the last couple of days, what percentage of Americans would have to be vaccinated for us to go back to normal life?
This is while he was getting his booster shot because Joe Biden is 127 years old.
Here is Joe Biden explaining what percentage of Americans must be vaccinated for us to, quote unquote, go back to normal.
How many Americans need to be vaccinated for us to go back to normal?
What is the percentage of total vaccinations that have to be deployed?
Well, I think, look, I think we get The vast majority, like it's going on in some of the, some industries and some schools, 97, 98 percent.
I think we're getting awful close.
But I'm not the scientist.
I think, but one thing for sure, a quarter of the country can't go unvaccinated and that's not continuing.
Okay, a quarter of the country can't go unvaccinated and us not have a problem.
Who is us?
Right?
Who is us?
The people who are unvaccinated don't have a problem in their own minds because they've decided not to get vaccinated.
75% of people who are vaccinated are vaccinated.
So who the hell are you talking about?
97?
98% of the people getting vaccinated?
Who does it?
Does he actually think that's going to happen?
Or anything remotely like it?
There's not a scientist in America who thinks that's going to happen.
So if you set as your baseline, you have to get 97, 98% of people vaccinated in order for Joe Biden's economy to succeed and us to go back to quote-unquote normal, you're going to end up with some pretty crazy policy.
And by the way, you are ending up with some pretty insane policy.
So right now, for example, New York has this vaccine passport that's being used.
Now, we know these vaccine passports are not supremely effective.
The Israeli health ministry was caught on a hot mic saying, yeah, they're not effective.
We're just trying to get people to vaccinate.
But, Broadway returned.
And in New York, they have these vaccine cards you're supposed to show.
Broadway returned.
Wednesday night's performance of Aladdin was cancelled.
Why?
Because there were positive COVID tests within the cast and crew.
Not that anybody was symptomatic.
Not that they sent home the symptomatic.
Not that everybody else got to stay.
They closed the entire show.
They closed the entire show.
24 hours in.
Because of a breakthrough COVID case.
Which is not going to kill or hospitalize anybody.
Okay, this is crazy.
This is crazy, Townes.
You'd think that somehow Broadway's remained open during flu season, when everybody's shouting and spitting on each other, like Gary Oldman in an old episode of Friends.
Somehow they've been able to survive for, you know, a hundred years on Broadway, with many outbreaks of various diseases.
And yet this is what is shutting them down?
Is breakthrough cases of COVID among the vaccinated?
If that's your logic, you end up in crazy town.
And Joe Biden is ending up in crazy town.
I mean, he's already in senile town.
Now he has taken the weigh station stop in crazy town as well.
One of the things that he has leveraged into this budget bill is a tenfold increase in fines for employers who quote, willfully, repeatedly, or even seriously violate a section of labor law that deals with hazards, deaths, or serious physical harm to their employees.
In other words, if a company, over 100 employees, does not mandatorily vax their people or get them tested every week and then testify to the federal government that they are doing so, the fines could run as high as $70,000 for serious infractions and $700,000 for willful or repeated violations, three quarters of a million dollars for each fine.
Three quarters of a million dollars for each fine, bankrupting essentially every mid-sized business in the United States that doesn't force down a vaccine mandate on people or fire everybody who's not vaccinated.
The Biden administration is already starting to implement the vaccine mandate enforcement blueprints, according to Forbes.com.
OSHA set precedent this summer.
They published that emergency COVID-19 rule in the Federal Register.
Early in September, Biden announced that 100 or more employee COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
By the way, you'll notice something.
The OSHA rules don't apply to customers.
There's nothing that says you have to backscreen people who enter your establishment, which for most businesses, particularly retail businesses, that's a lot of people coming into your business who may or may not have COVID.
The legislative provision passing the Budget Committee raises those fines 10 times higher and up to $700,000 for every willful or repeated violation.
If the legislation is enacted, OSHA could levy draconian fines to enforce that vaccine mandate.
This would hit an estimated 80 million workers.
So that's what's in this garbage bill.
And then they wonder why people are acting afraid, why the economy isn't going back to normal, because you're scaring the living hell out of them.
Now, I know people who are triple vaxxed and are still acting as though they are going to die.
They're walking around with KN95s after being triple vaxxed, not because they're afraid of infecting other people, but because they themselves are afraid of getting infected.
Which, I'm sorry, is crazy.
That is not risk assessment.
That's just you being crazy.
According to the Associated Press, Bronwyn Russell wears a mask anytime she leaves her Illinois home, though she wouldn't dream of going out to eat or to hear a band play, much less setting foot on a plane.
Oh, a plane.
By the way, planes have not been a vector of transmission this entire time.
They have HEPA filters.
In Virginia, Oliver Midgett rarely dons a mask, never lets COVID-19 rouse any worry, and happily finds himself in restaurants and among crowds.
She is vaccinated.
He is not.
As I have said, people who are unvaccinated are typically not worried.
People who are vaccinated seem to remain worried.
A poll of people aged 50 or older found 36% are very or extremely worried that they or a family member will be infected, roughly doubled since June.
The increase is fueled by the vaccinated, who are especially likely to be highly worried.
Just 25% of vaccinated Americans, but 61% of unvaccinated Americans say they are not worried.
That is because of Joe Biden and because of Joe Biden alone.
He lied about the risks of the vaccine.
He literally said to the American people, you have to worry about whether you yourself are going to be infected by an unvaxxed person after being vaccinated.
He said, we have to protect the vaxxed from the unvaxxed.
Isn't that what the vaccine is supposed to do?
Wasn't that the point of the vaccine?
This is why you end up with the worst possible result.
Unvaxxed Americans, who should be more afraid, which would prompt them to get the vaccine, are not worried.
And vaxxed Americans, who should be back to living normal life and supporting the economy and supporting their families, they're freaking out.
Because of Joe Biden.
Because of Joe Biden.
Because he is an incompetent.
Alrighty, well to back all of this, to back all of this and to try and cudgel people into getting vaccinated, whether or not they would like to do so, the Biden administration continues to push on all fronts.
Their latest front is they're pushing pregnant people to get vaccinated.
Now, I have family members who are pregnant who have asked about COVID vaccination.
I have friends who are pregnant who have asked about COVID vaccination or about to get pregnant, they've asked about COVID vaccination.
And what I've told them is that best available data shows that the vaccines are not only safe for pregnant people to take, best available data, not all data, Redgen, we don't have longitudinal data, best available data shows that the COVID vaccines are less dangerous to your pregnancy than COVID itself.
You're more likely to get sick and get your baby sick if you have COVID than you are if you get the vaccine.
That's best available data, so far as I'm aware.
And doctors like Marty McHarry from Johns Hopkins University, who's been our go-to throughout the pandemic, he has said that pregnant women, particularly after the first trimester, should think about getting the COVID vaccine dose one.
And then if you can delay dose two until after you've had the baby, then that might be the smartest possible choice.
That's sort of been his advice.
Okay, now the CDC is coming out and saying that pregnant women should get vaccinated.
Now, by best available evidence, I agree.
Here's the problem.
Here's how the CDC phrased this on Twitter.
You ready for this?
Pregnant people with symptomatic COVID-19 have a 70% increased risk of death.
Only 31% of pregnant people have been vaccinated against COVID-19.
Get vaccinated.
Find a COVID-19 vaccine near you.
Vaccines.gov.
So, um, I have a question.
Am I supposed to trust you guys on science when you use the term pregnant people?
Pregnant people.
You scientific experts out there.
Pregnant people.
What, you mean like my dad's gonna get pregnant?
I'm going to get... Who are these pregnant people of whom you... Do you mean women?
Do you mean pregnant women?
Because men cannot get pregnant?
The same morons who will tell you, follow the science are constantly yelling in your ear that men and women are completely malleable categories that do not exist.
When in every major mammalian species, there is sexual dichotomy, which provides the basis for reproduction.
And here you are talking about the actual reproductive capacity.
We're not even talking about difference between men and women in the workplace.
We're talking about actual reproductive capacity, which is the defining feature of male versus female.
And you can't even say female.
And then you're telling me I need to trust you on the science?
I have questions.
I think a lot of people have questions.
It's amazing how few of these people are willing to look in the mirror and take a little bit of blame for the fact that they've completely debunked their own credibility.
And by the way, if you then suppress conversations about this stuff, you're not helping yourself.
So YouTube has now announced That they're going to ban anti-vax activists from YouTube.
Now again, there's no one on the right who's more pro-vaccine than I am.
You can go back to 2015.
I was talking about vaccine mandates for childhood diseases.
I was talking about how pro-vaccine I was and how the anti-vax movement was a real problem in the United States.
Okay, so you will find no one on the right who is more openly pro-vaxxing than I am.
It is patently crazy for you as YouTube, a platform, to be banning quote-unquote anti-vax content in the name of somehow getting people to vax.
You think all the people who are watching that anti-vax content now that you've banned it are going to think, oh, well, you know, they banned it on YouTube.
I guess now I believe them.
Suppression of viewpoint is typically a very bad way of convincing people who are curious about the viewpoint that the viewpoint is bad.
It usually makes them more curious about the viewpoint.
YouTube is apparently taking down several video channels associated with high-profile anti-vax activists like Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Who experts say are partially responsible for helping seed the skepticism that's contributed to slowing vaccination rates across the country.
As part of a new set of policies aimed at cutting down on anti-vax content on the Google-owned site, YouTube will ban any videos that claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous.
The company previously blocked videos that made those claims about COVID vaccine, but not for ones like measles or chickenpox.
Misinformation researchers have for years said the popularity of anti-vaccine content on YouTube was contributing to growing skepticism of life-saving vaccines in the United States and around the world.
Vaccination rates have slowed.
About 56% of the U.S.
population has had two shots, compared with 71% in Canada and 67% in the UK.
And of course, President Biden is blaming social media companies as opposed to his own institutional lack of credibility.
You'll notice the partisan gap in terms of vaccination rates.
That is not a giant surprise, considering the people who trust the media are taking the vaccine, and the people who don't trust the media are not taking the vaccine as much.
Now, people across the board should be taking the vaccine.
But if you think that then suppressing alternative sources of media is going to be the way that you actually convince people who are anti-vax that you are trustworthy, you are crazy.
And you're particularly crazy when you simultaneously say that speech is your core value.
So YouTube recently announced, Susan Wojcicki, she recently announced that YouTube's core value is free speech.
Also, we are going to be suppressing particular apps from Alexei Navalny, who is Vladimir Putin's chief rival.
And now a lot of people are going to look at this and they're going to say, you mean the same company that is suppressing rivals to Vladimir Putin is suppressing anti-vax content?
Weird how that works.
That doesn't seem like people who are committed to the truth.
It seems like people who are committed to whatever gets them ahead today.
That would not be a wild conclusion to draw.
Here's Susan Wojcicki.
One of the things that is important to us at YouTube is the fact that we do enable so many voices and that we do enable people to express themselves and really celebrate the freedom of speech.
And we certainly, that's a core value of ours.
Navalny said that YouTube deleted a video, one of his videos.
Was that...
At the request of the Russian government?
I mean, we certainly get requests from governments, and we look and consider why are we getting the request, what's actually happening on the ground, and based on a whole bunch of different factors, we make a decision.
Okay, would those bunch of different factors be making money in coordination with governments like the Russian government or like the Biden administration?
Would those have anything to do with anything at all?
Funny how all of the people on the left who are constantly worried about big tech and government working together, the threats of centralized power, suddenly when it comes to the governments that they like telling big tech what to do, they are very much in favor of the hijacking of big tech in favor of their favorite policy proposals.
Fascinating how that works.
Okay, meanwhile, over the last couple of days while I was out for the final of the Jewish holidays, so don't worry, I won't be taking any more breaks in the near future, Over the past couple of days, there have been a bunch of hearings in the Senate over the debacle in Afghanistan.
And it is well worth pointing out that now, finally, after, you know, we've been out of there for about a month, and a hundred Americans are still trapped behind enemy lines minimum, and thousands of green card holders are trapped behind there, and tens of thousands of SIV holders are trapped behind enemy lines with the Taliban hanging people in central squares in cities like Herat.
There's a whole series of decisions that take place over 20 years.
back into the basement and all that.
Now we're finding out that this was all a bad idea.
Who could have thunk?
Who could have thunk?
General Milley, the all powerful, almighty General Mark Milley.
He came out and said, oh yeah, we lost the war.
Yeah, no bleep Sherlock, you did, well done.
There's a whole series of decisions that take place over 20 years.
I don't think that whenever you get some phenomena like a war that is lost, and it has been, in the sense of we accomplished our strategic task of protecting America against Al Qaeda, but certainly the end state is a whole lot different than what we wanted.
So whenever a phenomenon like that happens, there's an awful lot of causal factors and we're going to have to figure that out.
Oh, well, I mean, one of those causal factors would have been the complete withdrawal of American troops without any sort of plan for upholding the Afghan military, withdrawing all air support, withdrawing all civilian contractors, and then withdrawing the military before any of the civilians could leave.
Maybe, I don't know, just a guess.
I had a couple of guesses there.
I think maybe some of them are accurate.
Then, Milley apparently, in a confidential briefing, he apparently directly blamed the State Department.
He said officials waited too long to order the operation out of Kabul's airport.
Two days of testimony from Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and General Frank McKenzie, head of CENTCOM, underscore the finger-pointing and deep divisions between state and the Pentagon.
Lawmakers are demanding accountability over the Biden administration's chaotic exit from Afghanistan, including the failure to evacuate thousands of at-risk Afghan allies and leaving without evacuating all Americans.
The State Department delayed evacuations at the order of President Biden after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani warned that evacuating Afghan allies earlier would destroy morale and lead to the collapse of the government.
During a closed-door session after Tuesday's public testimony, Senator Tammy Duckworth directed a general question to Austin about lessons learned from the withdrawal.
And Milley jumped in to say the evacuation of civilians needed to happen earlier.
So Milley was like, it wasn't us, it was the State Department.
Remember, Joe Biden said there was virtual unanimity inside his administration.
His military folks were just backing what he had to say.
Lies.
And General Milley also admitted, in testimony, that the Taliban never broke affiliation with Al Qaeda.
Remember that time they were saying that the Taliban was helping us fight Al Qaeda and fight ISIS, and they were really, they're moderating?
That was all a lie.
There were seven conditions applicable to the Taliban.
and eight conditions applicable to the United States.
While the Taliban did not attack U.S.
forces, which was one of the conditions, it failed to fully honor any, any other condition under the Doha agreement.
And perhaps most importantly for U.S.
national security, the Taliban has never renounced al-Qaeda or broke its affiliation with them.
Oh, well, um, that's that's weird because you know either that might have been helpful for the American people to know when you surrendered the entire country to them.
Hey, Lloyd Austin, the incompetent Secretary of Defense, he also blamed the State Department.
Was it your judgment and opinion that the evacuations of civilians should have begun before the middle of August?
We provided our input to the State Department.
And again, it is the call of the State Department to... I understand that.
I understand that, Mr. Secretary.
I'm asking for what your judgment was.
We provided input to try to get out as many Afghans who have helped us along the way as early as possible.
But again, the State Department has made its decisions.
Oh, interesting.
Interesting how that worked.
You know, you didn't see any of this in real time, right?
In real time, they were all shoulder to shoulder because your politicians lie to you.
Political appointees lie to you.
And just because they're generals and they're at the top of the hierarchy does not mean they're not lying to you.
They're such a thing as political generals.
Many of them get to the top of the hierarchy specifically because they're politically adept.
Lloyd Austin now admitting, oh yeah, by the way, terrorism is a threat, like as of right now from Afghanistan.
We were told that it was like two, three years away.
Nope, not right now.
Al Qaeda has been degraded over time.
Now terrorist organizations seek ungoverned spaces so that they can train and equip and thrive.
And so there is clearly a possibility that that can happen here going forward.
And meanwhile, Frank McKenzie, head of CENTCOM, remember he was praising the Taliban and he was talking about how helpful they were throughout this entire process.
He admits that the Taliban offered the United States control over Kabul so we could evacuate people, and the United States turned it down at the behest of the Biden administration.
They said, no, no, no, we only want Kabul airport.
Well, only 13 American service members had to die for that particular decision.
Here's Ken McKenzie.
Who made the decision to turn down the Taliban offer to allow the US military to secure Kabul And put the safety of our troops in the hands of the Taliban.
I did not consider that to be a formal offer, and it was not the reason why I was there.
So I did not pursue it.
So if someone actually made a decision, that would have been me.
So we don't know if it was conveyed to the president?
We don't know?
I do know it was conveyed to my chain of command.
Okay, it was conveyed to his chain of command, he just decided, oh, well, what, meh.
By the way, Jen Psaki now admitting, by the way, that generals did in fact want troops there.
When Joe Biden was out there lying to us, saying all of his generals were in agreement with him, that was obviously untrue at the time.
And some of us were pointing out he was lying at the time.
Here's Jen Psaki admitting he was lying at the time.
What we're talking about here was an initial recommendation in the short initial period of time of having a troop presence that would continue.
Not a surprise, the recommendation over the course of the last 20 years from the military has been to maintain a troop presence.
You could argue that's their job, to maintain that.
The president's view when making a risk assessment, when reviewing his options, was that he did not want to escalate the number of troops we had in Afghanistan.
He did not want to risk losing more troops.
He did not want to go back at war with the Taliban.
Okay, so bottom line, it was Biden's call, even while Biden was blaming everybody else.
What a bleep show this administration is.
I mean, truly and honestly, it is such a bleep show.
And here's the thing.
Joe Biden, that senile old guy, what's waiting in the wings is way worse than Joe Biden.
And Kamala Harris is way worse than Joe Biden.
This is why Democrats have to be in a state of low-level panic that is quickly rising to high-level panic.
I mean, they're moving from DEF CON 3 to about DEF CON 2.
Right now.
Because if they end up with Kamala Harris as a candidate in 2024, after this bleep show of an administration, they are in serious, serious trouble.
How bad is Kamala Harris, by the way?
Kamala Harris is so bad at this, that yesterday, she was confronted by a student at some sort of speech, and the student started just spewing anti-Semitic garbage about Israel.
Saying that Israel was involved in a quote-unquote ethnic genocide.
Okay, which is just an anti-Semitic lie.
It is just a Jew-hating lie.
There is no support for it.
And Kamala Harris, because she's incompetent and terrible at this, immediately granted a credence.
Over the summer, there have been protests and demonstrations and astronomical numbers standing with Palestine.
But then just a few days ago, there were funds allocated to continue backing Israel, which hurts my heart because it's an ethnic genocide and the displacement of people, the same that happened in America.
Okay, and Kamala Harris nods while that is happening.
And then she suggested, quote, I'm glad you did about this girl asking the question.
I'm glad you did.
I'm glad you did.
Again, this is about the fact that your voice, your perspective, your experience, your truth should not be suppressed.
Woo!
Okay, so that's waiting in the wings for the Democrats.
No wonder they are in a state of panic.
They should be.
They should be.
This administration... Here's the thing.
Whether or not they pass this bipartisan infrastructure bill, whether or not they pass this budget bill, they've got a major problem on their hands, and they should.
They're bad at governing, their ideas are wrong, and their politicians are both incompetent and poor at their actual public-facing jobs.
All of which, you know, says that there is not a bright future for this particular administration.
Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
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Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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