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Oct. 18, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

46:48

Send The Entire Biden Administration On Paternity Leave | Ep. 1356

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	China fires a hypersonic low-orbit missile capable of striking the United States, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg returns to inform us how useless he is, and Superman isn't about the American way anymore.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Your data is your business protected at ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
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	Alrighty, so...
	I want to begin with two contrasting stories, because this really does sum up the state of where America is right now, culturally.
	So, two stories break over the weekend.
	Seemingly unrelated, but kind of related.
	One is this amazing story about how China had developed this massive missile technology that basically took the United States by surprise.
	A lot of people are calling it a second Sputnik moment.
	Sputnik, of course, is the moment when the Soviet Union was the first to launch a spacecraft that actually orbited the Earth and the rest of the rest of the world's like, whoa, where did the USSR come from here?
	We thought that they were way behind.
	Technologically speaking, this, of course, launches the space race and leads to President Kennedy suggesting that eventually we're going to go to the moon.
	All of this was about the Soviet Union surprising everyone with the technological prowess of sending a spacecraft into Earth orbit.
	Well, now the Chinese have basically done the same thing.
	And this is going to lead, you would imagine, to a bit of a new arms race here, according to the UK Daily Mail.
	Beijing has mocked America by saying their secret test of a 21,000-mile-per-hour nuclear-capable missile, which orbited the globe before returning to Earth to strike its target, is a new blow to the U.S.
	mentality of strategic superiority over China.
	The jibe follows a report from the Financial Times, which cited five unnamed intelligence sources saying that the Chinese military launched a Long March rocket in August, carrying a hypersonic glide vehicle into low orbit.
	It circled the globe before descending toward its target, which it missed by about two dozen miles, in a technological development that would overcome U.S.
	anti-ballistic missile systems.
	So right now, the United States has anti-ballistic missile systems that are largely based in Alaska, because the idea is that if the Chinese were to fire a missile capable of striking the United States, it would have to travel over the north part of the globe, and then we would see it, and then we would be able to use our anti-missile technology and shoot it down from Alaska.
	The new technology allows the Chinese to strike the United States from the south by sending a missile into low orbit.
	The incident caught the U.S.
	intelligence community by surprise.
	It shows China has made astonishing progress on the development of its hypersonic weapons, according to sources.
	One person familiar with the test said, To rub salt into their wounds, an op-ed in the Chinese state media outlet Global Times, Beijing's mouthpiece, said the test means there's a new key member in China's nuclear deterrence system, adding this is a new blow to the U.S.' 's mentality of strategic superiority over China.
	So this is explicitly an attempt to defeat the United States' missile defense system.
	Again, those hypersonic missiles can reach speeds up to 21,000 miles per hour.
	They can strike anywhere on Earth from space within minutes.
	And the goal here is to avoid the normal trajectories for the ballistic missiles and thus evade U.S.
	missile defense.
	So all of this is to say that China is obviously upping the ante here.
	China has been becoming more and more belligerent on the world stage.
	They're taking advantage of American weakness.
	And meanwhile, what's happening here in the United States, what's happening here in the United States is that many Americans, and I would say a large percentage of people in the Democratic Party, are simply embarrassed by the idea of a muscular America, period.
	And this has now become a cultural thing, because not only are there a lot of Americans who are embarrassed by the idea of a muscular America at home, right?
	We should all be embarrassed of being Americans.
	America was founded in 1619.
	America really has nothing to show the rest of the world.
	Also, at the same time, the United States should be catering to, for example, the Chinese market.
	And you can see both of those moves happening in this, what would be a kind of small cultural story normally, except it really isn't.
	When you're talking about iconic American art and the transformation of that American art into a sort of anti-American art There's a reason for that, and it's a big problem.
	So the story that emerged over the weekend is that Superman is officially moving on from the American way.
	So the slogan for Superman, so we've had a lot about Superman in the past several weeks, turns out that the new Superman, who is Superman's son, is bisexual, which is all very exciting.
	We have to have a Superman of every sexual orientation before America truly has reached its apex.
	As I've suggested, Until Superman is actually a transgender little person.
	I think this is all pinkwashing.
	But Superman himself, the classic original character, is going to be getting rid of the slogan that was used for many years for Superman, truth, justice, and the American way.
	Now, Superman as a character had been moving in this direction for quite a while.
	So you'll recall that in Superman Returns, there was a line where it was used as a throwaway.
	It was truth, justice and all the rest of that stuff.
	It was a very cynical movie.
	And the idea was that that there's nothing special about the American way.
	And truth be told, if you go back internationally to the Superman character, Superman had used a variety of different slogans over the years.
	But the one that everybody identified with Superman was truth, justice and the American way, because that was coined during the 50s.
	And then it was used again in the in the Christopher Reeve's movie of the same title, Superman, in which he says, truth, justice, and the American way.
	And well, now they're getting rid of it officially.
	Jim Lee, the chief creative officer and publisher of DC, announced on Saturday during the virtual fan event at DC Fandom that the Man of Steel's motto will be evolving from the well-known mantra that he fights for truth, justice, and the American way.
	Superman's new mission statement is truth, justice, and a better tomorrow, which, of course, suggests that the American way is not all that great.
	We need, quote unquote, a better tomorrow.
	Which sounds, frankly, like every other revolutionary movement that has ever taken place on planet Earth.
	Truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.
	And it'd be indistinguishable from a Chinese Superman.
	What exactly would a Chinese Superman say?
	Presumably, truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.
	In a press statement, the company said the decision is meant to, quote, and to honor Superman's incredible legacy of over 80 years of building a better world.
	So as I say, the fact is that Truth, Justice, and the American Way didn't start with the first Superman books.
	It was used during the Adventures of Superman TV series in the 1950s, but there's no question that it was the slogan that was most associated with Superman over the life of the character.
	And now, of course, the new Superman is not just bisexual, he also marches in favor of climate change regulation and all the rest.
	Okay, so why is this important and what's the juxtaposition to China firing hypersonic missiles?
	The idea is that nature abhors vacuum and so does international politics.
	When great empires like the United States, and the United States is a great world empire.
	It may not be a territorial holding world empire in the same way as the British Empire, but it is the global hegemon.
	When a global hegemon decides that it is no longer interested in global leadership, when it starts navel-gazing and seeing that it is actually the problem, and that we have to change our own ways, that we, you know, we need to bring everybody home.
	We need to, we need to forget about our role in the world.
	We need to forget about our own ideals and how they stack up against other ideals.
	Because after all, the United States has its own problems.
	When hegemons start to do this, other countries take advantage of this.
	Other countries are going to step into the reach.
	A hesitant United States, a United States that believes that it is not inherently good, that there's no such thing as quote-unquote the American way, when your entire culture has decided that the American way is really more akin to racism, bigotry, homophobia, inequality.
	And when you stack up the United States, not against the other countries of the world, in terms of what the United States does and has done, but in terms of some sort of utopian ideal, you're always going to fall short.
	But I'll tell you what, China is not having any of those same sorts of issues, right?
	China right now is doing two things, right?
	They are muscular on foreign policy and they're hyper-jingle-istic at home.
	So China, infamously last week, decided they were going to take down the last monument to the victims of Tiananmen Square in Hong Kong.
	And the rest of the world kind of shrugged.
	And the rest of the world kind of shrugged because China is doing what countries have historically done when they want to prove themselves muscular on the world stage.
	They're saying to their own citizens that our way of life is better and we are stronger.
	And meanwhile, the entire West is in the middle of the throes of chaos and confusion ideologically and philosophically.
	This sort of internally driven, is what's wrong with us?
	Why are we so bad?
	We're the problem.
	And the only way to correct that problem is, of course, to bring home all of our resources and then spend it on ourselves until we die.
	Because the best way of fixing the problems internal to the United States is basically to get fat and lazy and climb into that warm bathtub and cut open your veins like Pantangeli in Godfather 2.
	Like the Roman emperors of old.
	Declining, dying empires act like the United States is acting right now.
	Empires that are on the rise act like China.
	Another part of this that's so astonishing in terms of the attitude is that China is uniquely vulnerable right now.
	So combined with China's new jingoism is an economic jingoism that's really bad for their economy.
	Because here's the thing.
	Karl Marx talked about the inherent contradictions of capitalism and how this was inevitably going to bring about the downfall of capitalism.
	The reality is that capitalism is extraordinarily robust and capitalism can't be brought down by capitalism.
	Capitalism can only be brought down by people who wish to overthrow capitalism.
	That's not true with regard to communism, which relies on suppression.
	Communism relies on destroying people who stand in its way.
	The inherent contradictions of communism are replete in China.
	Right now, China is experiencing some pretty significant economic issues.
	Now would be an excellent time to take advantage of Chinese economic weakness.
	Because of course, if China is making the case for quote-unquote the Chinese way, they also have to be making the case for the Chinese communist system, which is actually a particularly unsuccessful system.
	In terms of economics, the only part of the Chinese system that works at all is the part of the Chinese system that is capitalism and free trade dependent.
	The part of the system that is rooted in redistribution and government subsidies is wildly unsuccessful on a dollar-to-dollar level.
	They'll develop a piece of technology once in a while, but on a competing and free market stage, China can't compete.
	And meanwhile, you have the leadership in China that's turning inward.
	Xi Jinping is basically saying China ought to rule the world, and our economic system has to get more communists, not less communists.
	Those two things are in extraordinary contradiction.
	Because the more China becomes more communistic at home, the weaker they are.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, with its pandemic recovery in the rearview mirror, China now faces a prolonged period of slower growth with increasing policy uncertainties as Beijing attempts to carry out ambitious long-term reforms.
	China's economy recorded a steeper-than-expected economic slowdown in the third quarter of the year, expanding 4.9% from a year earlier.
	The disappointing growth rate reflected a host of headwinds.
	Tighter rules on the property market that have chilled activity in the private sector.
	Widespread power shortages.
	Continued concerns about COVID-19.
	While economists had predicted momentum to slow from the first and second quarters of the year, as the statistical base effect from last year faded, the Chinese economy now faces a more daunting set of challenges than had been foreseen earlier in the year.
	After China emerged from a coronavirus wreck in 2020 as the only major world economy to report gross domestic product growth, it set a target in March for expansion of 6% or more for the year.
	At the same time, Beijing made it clear it wanted to use the extra breathing room to take on long-festering issues in the economy, including reining in household and corporate debt.
	Particularly in the country's frothy housing market, as well as pursuing ambitious climate goals and more tightly regulating technology sector practices that have been seen as widening inequality.
	So China decided to double down on the communism and Maoism of its economic program, as opposed to doing what a lot of people thought they would do, which is sort of a continuing embrace of the gradual reopening here.
	of the Chinese economy.
	And so China is actually very vulnerable right now, or they would be vulnerable to a civilization that actually cared about its future and had the strength of its convictions.
	But we are not that civilization.
	I'll get to a story that demonstrates this in just one second.
	The culture war in the United States matters an awful lot.
	And it matters an awful lot because it does have impact for things like foreign policy.
	It has impact as to whether you believe the United States ought to face up to the challenges of China or whether the United States can even say with any level of certainty that it is better than China, that the West is better than China and ought to win on a civilizational scale.
	I do not think that it is a coincidence that the China that is pouring money into its military, the China that is pouring money and resources into the possibility of retaking Taiwan and building Belt and Road and sucking its citizens dry to do all of these things.
	I don't think that it's any coincidence that that country is also pursuing more communism at home because, again, they are trying to demonstrate the superiority of their own value system.
	Meanwhile, the West is hellbent on demonstrating the inferiority of its own value system.
	On self-flagellating in pathetic fashion.
	That's not how you win a war.
	A war of ideas or a traditional war.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
	First, let's talk about a simple fact right now.
	There are over 10 million open jobs in the United States and there are not enough workers to make up for those jobs.
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	The job market is really difficult right now for employers.
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	It gives you, the hiring manager, the power to pick your favorites from top candidates.
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	And so a perfect encapsulation of the culture war that is taking place between China and the United States is this story from the New York Times.
	It's about a professor from the University of Michigan who has now found himself in the crosshairs.
	Quote, It was supposed to be an opportunity for music students at the University of Michigan to learn about the process of adapting a classic literary text into an opera from one of the music school's most celebrated professors, the composer Bright Shang.
	But at the first class meeting of this fall's undergraduate composition seminar, when Professor Shang hit play on the 1965 film of Shakespeare's Othello starring Laurence Olivier, it quickly became a lesson in something else entirely.
	Students said they sat in stunned silence as Olivier appeared on screen in thickly painted blackface makeup.
	Even before class ended 90 minutes later, group chat messages were flying, along with at least one email of complaint to the department reporting that many students were quote, incredibly offended, both by this video and by the lack of explanation as to why this was selected for our class.
	Within hours, Sheng had sent a terse email issuing the first of what would be two apologies.
	Then, after weeks of emails, open letters, and cancelled classes, it was announced on October 1st that Professor Sheng, a two-time Pulitzer finalist and winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant, was voluntarily stepping back from the class entirely in order to allow for a positive learning environment.
	The incident might have remained just the latest flashpoint at a music program that has been roiled in recent years by a series of charges of misconduct by star professors.
	But a day before Shang stepped down, a long-scaling Medium post by a student in the class rippled across Twitter before getting picked up in Newsweek, Fox News, the Daily Mail, and beyond, entangling one of the nation's leading music schools in the supercharged national debate over race, academic freedom, and free speech.
	To some observers, it's a case of campus cancel culture run amok, with overzealous students refusing to accept an apology.
	With the added twist, and here's the story, that the Chinese-born Professor Sheng was a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, during which the Red Guards had seized the family piano.
	Okay, so, the reason that he was showing the Laurence Olivier Othello as sort of a Shakespeare maven, there are many film versions of Othello.
	And they range from Orson Welles doing Othello, like, in blackface, to Laurence Olivier doing Othello, to Laurence Fishburne, obviously, doing Othello.
	He's a black man.
	There's many versions of Othello.
	The Laurence Olivier version is a classic version of the film.
	He is not wearing blackface because he is seeking to mock black people.
	He's wearing blackface in that film because he is playing Othello, who is a black character.
	This is how Othello was played on the stage for literally centuries.
	It is not insensitive for the professor to show you a classic film, even though we wouldn't do this today.
	We wouldn't make that film the same way today.
	We'd cast a black actor as Othello, for sure.
	It is not offensive to show a 1965 film starring the greatest actor maybe ever playing Othello in the way that Othello was traditionally played on the stage.
	And that is really not any reason to cancel anybody.
	But again, what makes the story incredible is that this guy fled China and he fled the Cultural Revolution, right?
	The Cultural Revolution in China was all about telling people they could not think in a particular way.
	And now he fled to the United States, becomes this very famous music professor, and then is basically forced out of his class because he violated some unwritten precept of stupidity.
	As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, to avoid being sent to a farm to be re-educated, he auditioned for an officially sanctioned folk music ensemble and was sent to Qinghai Province, a remote area near the Tibetan border, according to a university biography.
	After the universities reopened in 1976, he got a degree in composition from Shanghai University.
	In 1982, he moved to the United States and earned, eventually, a doctorate at Columbia University.
	Okay, so the kind of ridiculousness of the Of cancelling a survivor of the Cultural Revolution in precisely the same way that students shouted down professors and demanded their expulsion during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
	The irony of that and the depth of the depravity of that can't be overstated.
	To take a survivor of the Cultural Revolution and then subject him to very similar sort of activity in the United States is pretty incredible and demonstrates the weakness that lies at the heart of the Western Project at this moment.
	Liberalism, traditional classical liberalism, does rely on an acceptance of certain natural law values.
	And when those are undermined, the liberalism tends to turn in on itself and collapse in on itself.
	The doubt and the sort of value pluralism that liberalism accepts.
	Isaiah Berlin, famous philosopher, he suggested that the value of liberty lay in what he called value pluralism, meaning we all have different values and we sort of have to leave each other alone and that's why we need liberty.
	But that requires you have certain baseline level of values as a society about which you are actually quite confident.
	Value pluralism collapses into moral relativism, into all value systems are equal, unless you believe that there is in fact a higher value system.
	Now, as Isaiah Berlin thought, it can be kind of a broad value system, things like free speech are good, things like you have to have property rights, like those can be the higher values.
	And then within those kind of broad frameworks, you can have a lot of disagreement about how to balance things like safety, social safety nets and property rights, right?
	You can have those conversations.
	But you have to have that broad framework and you have to be proud and muscular about that broad framework.
	When you are not, however, then you tend to collapse very quickly into the sort of self-destructive thought that has taken place on America's campuses and now spread out like a cancer across American society, culminating in our cultural icons being destroyed, culminating in a government that is afraid to stand up for any sort of American values in any serious way against the radicals inside its own midst.
	And you turn a civilization that once was the sort of light of the world and Western civilization was the light of the world and it continues to be the light of the world if it has any sort of understanding of what the rest of the world looks like.
	Instead, it seems like we are spending all of our time worried about how we cleanse ourselves and purge ourselves of all of our sins or all of our supposed sins and adopt the methods of the cultural revolution in order to do so.
	Meanwhile, the actual cultural revolutionaries on the other side of the world have no such qualms about imposing their own values on their own people and then spreading those values outward.
	You can hollow out an empire pretty easily this way, and that's exactly what is happening.
	But, at least we're telling ourselves that we're fat and happy.
	How do you keep?
	There are a few ways that you keep a population of a civilization in check.
	You can do it through repression, is the way the Chinese do it.
	You can do it through open repression, where you just tell people to sit down and shut up and you'll shoot them if they don't listen.
	You can also do it through a certain level of patriotism.
	Right, which can shade over on the negative side into jingoism, but it's a very important thing, right?
	Nationalistic belief, belief that your nation is great, does keep people motivated.
	It can be used for good, it can be used for ill.
	But, as I say, it can be used for good.
	Or, you can basically bribe people.
	You can bribe people and keep them complacent as the civilization falls into decline.
	And that seems to be the path that the United States wants to take, or at least the Democratic Party, is now pushing.
	And we should all sort of be happy with the kind of crappy mediocrity into which we are sinking.
	Because after all, the government is capable of paying for everything, or borrowing for everything, and in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes said, we are all dead anyway.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
	First, let's talk about a simple fact.
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	Okay, so as I say, the way that you keep a population complacent while the civilization begins to sink into irrelevance and in danger, its future, is you just keep them fat and You keep them on the dole.
	Now the problem is that the issues with that are already beginning to sink in.
	I think that a fundamental sea change happened over the course of this pandemic.
	There are many fundamental sea changes.
	It turns out that it doesn't take people long to acclimate to new circumstances.
	Right, you can put people, Viktor Frankl wrote about this in much worse circumstances with regard obviously to the Holocaust.
	Viktor Frankl talked about the fact that people who sort of had a baseline level of happiness tended to actually continue that attitude even under the worst circumstances.
	Human beings are incredibly adaptable creatures, right?
	This is why human beings are such a successful species, despite the fact that we're essentially hairless apes who are very vulnerable, have no claws, and are less physically strong than any of the predators who surround us.
	We're very smart, and we're very adaptable.
	That adaptability is great when you're talking about how do human beings adapt to difficult circumstances.
	It's very useful.
	But how do human beings adapt to being enervated?
	How do human beings adapt to being told that they need to stay in their homes for a full year and a half, and that they can't come outside except to protest for quote-unquote social justice, and that the government is going to just give them money?
	How do human beings adapt to that?
	Well, the answer is they adapt to a new normal really, really quickly.
	And I think this is what lies behind a lot of the passion for cloth masking, which, again, is not effective against Delta, according to Dr. Michael Osterholm of the former Biden administration.
	Like the cloth masks against Delta are very questionable.
	KN95 is a different story, but that's not the point.
	The point is that a lot of people have gotten very used to, very quickly, the sort of lifestyle the pandemic has launched for them.
	Working from home, being paid by the government to stay home, unemployment benefits, all this kind of stuff.
	And so people have adapted to this.
	And the Democrats know this.
	Now, the problem is that the system not only is not built for this, but the system can't survive this.
	You cannot have a capitalistic minority who are providing for the socialistic majority.
	If your goal is you're going to sit home and the government is going to pay for everything, and the workforce participation rate is 60% and dropping, that's going to be a major problem.
	And it's not just a problem for the United States, by the way.
	There's an article today in the Wall Street Journal about how the workforce participation rates are dropping all the way across the West.
	Right, the workforce participation rate problem is not a uniquely United States problem.
	All across the world, because people were paid to stay home, they're just staying home right now.
	And this is coming along with a lot of serious economic problems, including inflation.
	When you have fewer people producing fewer things, but the government is giving them a lot of money, they spend the money following the goods.
	As Milton Friedman famously suggested, inflation is anywhere and everywhere a monetary problem.
	Meaning that too much money following too few goods.
	It's a monetary phenomenon.
	So, when economists say that the problems are going to continue into next year, they're going to continue a lot longer than that unless people get back to work.
	And again, this is the tacit bargain that your leadership is making with you.
	The tacit bargain is, we will give you everything that you could possibly want.
	We can protect you from every vicissitude of life.
	All you have to do is just recognize that you're living in the last days of the civilization.
	These two things are combined.
	Now, what they lie about is they say, okay, well, now that we, once we correct all those problems, once we've built back better in the words of the Biden administration, once we've done all of that and built back better, then maybe we can be muscular on the world stage again.
	But they have no intention of doing that.
	It is not a coincidence that the same people who are perfectly sanguine about getting rid of truth, justice, and the American way are the exact same people who want to bribe you to stay home.
	Okay, that is not a, like, that is a 100% crossover Venn diagram.
	The Venn diagram there is a circle.
	It is a concentric circle.
	The people who are fine with getting rid of American branding and believing that America is kind of a nefarious force on the world stage.
	There is a 100% crossover with people who believe that the government should pay you to stay home.
	And it's not because they want to make America stronger.
	It's because they believe that America in its essence is wrong and needs to fundamentally change.
	And once it fundamentally changes, that will require America to remain pacifistic and surrender oriented on the world stage, not the opposite.
	It's not that we're going to get redistributive at home and fix all of our problems and then we'll get muscular.
	No, we're not.
	We're never getting muscular on the world stage.
	OK, so that means that the problems are going to continue to attend.
	According to The Wall Street Journal, uncomfortably high inflation will grip the United States economy well into 2022 as constrained supply chains keep upward pressure on prices and increasingly curb output, according to economists surveyed this month by The Wall Street Journal.
	Economists on average see inflation at 5.25% in December, just slightly less than the rate that has prevailed since June.
	Assuming a similar level in October and November, that would mark the longest inflation has been above 5% since early 1991.
	Michael Moran, Chief Economist at Daiwa Capital Markets America, says it's a perfect storm.
	Supply chain bottlenecks, tight labor markets, ultra-easy monetary and fiscal policies.
	Emphasis on the last part.
	Because the ultra-easy monetary and fiscal policies are incentivizing a tight labor market.
	They're telling people, stay home.
	If you are going to come back, ask for an inflated wage.
	But this drives up the inflated prices.
	As much as the Biden administration wants to talk about the great good of people staying home and driving up wages, wages have been outpaced by inflation this year.
	That does not mean a rising real wage.
	It means a dropping real wage.
	According to these respondents' average estimates, consumer price inflation will drop to 3.4% by the end of June next year, then 2.6% by the end of 2022.
	That's still above the average 1.8% that prevailed in the decade before the pandemic.
	Economists also have slashed their growth forecast this year to an average 3.1% annualized in the third quarter.
	That is below half of what they were surveyed as thinking it was going to be in July.
	They thought we were going to get 7% quarterly growth annualized in July.
	They're down to 3.1%.
	Also, they're lowering the projected fourth quarter growth to 4.8% from 5.4%.
	Michael Brown, principal U.S.
	from 5.4%. Michael Brown, principal U.S. economist at Visa says, quote, consumer spending and by extension GDP growth is being limited by high rates of inflation eroding the real purchasing power of consumers.
	So Democrats are trying to blame this all on the supply chain issues, but it's not just the It's when you pay people to stay home, when you incentivize people to stay home, and when you treat them for a year and a half as wards of the state, it's very difficult to get wards of the state to start being independent human beings again.
	People become risk averse.
	People become afraid.
	It's sort of like the problem that you have at places like SeaWorld, where you take a wild animal, you put in a domesticated situation, and then you feed it fish every single day.
	You can't just release it back in the wild because it won't know what to do.
	This is what we've done with huge swaths of the American population.
	We've made them dependent on the federal government to the point that people don't know how to undergo risk anymore.
	We may have reached the end of risk.
	The end of risk sounds really nice, except that real world risk still exists.
	You're just shielded from it.
	You're shielded from it by the decline of the United States.
	If the United States absorbs all the risk, then in the end, there won't be any innovation and there won't be any growth.
	DHL executive Jim Monkmeyer was on national TV over the weekend.
	He says these supply chain issues are going to continue all the way through 2022.
	If there's a truck available to get cargo off the docks of the port, it could come to a warehouse like this.
	How long the goods wait for the next truck is another potential delay.
	I think domestically, because the truck driving shortage is such an issue, we're going to see issues all the way through 2022.
	Okay, meanwhile, Pete Buttigieg, and this really does sum up the entire problem.
	So Pete Buttigieg is the supposedly brilliant Secretary of Transportation.
	We know he's brilliant because he taught himself Norwegian in order to read a book or something.
	I mean, sure, he was kind of a mediocre mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who couldn't even fill the potholes, and then was made the Secretary of Transportation for diversity purposes.
	But this brilliant human being who was going to fix all of our problems, right?
	He was one of the great administrators who was going to fix our problems.
	He went completely AWOL for two months, right?
	Completely AWOL.
	And nobody bothered to ask where he was.
	He was on paid paternity leave.
	Now, I'm not going to get into the debate over whether men should take paternity leave.
	I don't have a general problem with men taking a certain amount of paternity leave, although I think two months is too long a time.
	And I will tell you on a personal level, You know, thank God we have a family structure.
	My in-laws came down.
	My mom was available.
	When we had all three of our babies, my paternity leave lasted maybe a day and a half.
	Like, I would come home early.
	I'd try to clear my schedule as much as I could to help out my wife.
	And I will say that I think the factors are very different for paternity leave when you are taking care of a woman who is recovering from an actual physical trauma, which is what birth is, as opposed to when you just have a surrogate bird the babies.
	Like, the factors are just different.
	That's not to say that Pete Buttigieg isn't contributing at home.
	That's fine.
	I don't want to pay for it.
	And not for two months.
	You want to pay for it for two weeks.
	I get it.
	But for two months is kind of a long time in the middle of a supply chain crisis.
	Anyway, Pete Buttigieg goes absolutely AWOL for two weeks.
	And then he comes back long enough to do State of the Union, which is really what our government officials right now, they just, they're for the innervation.
	And they themselves are kind of lazy.
	I mean, they themselves don't really do anything.
	They are administrators who spend every day writing rules for you and then not paying attention to any of the rules for themselves.
	And then drawing a government paycheck while keeping their eye on the prize.
	I mean, the reason that Pete Buttigieg is Secretary of Transportation is because he wants to run for president.
	He couldn't win a Senate slot in Indiana.
	He couldn't win a gubernatorial slot in Indiana.
	So he ran for president as a mayor of a small town.
	And then, thanks to his diversity quotient, he was elevated into the cabinet with no qualifications for this position other than he likes choo-choo trains.
	I mean, he literally said that.
	He literally, in his opening speech, he was like, I love trains.
	Trains are great.
	Trains are, yeah, great.
	I'm glad that you once read Murder on the Orient Express, dude.
	Not sure why that qualifies you to help run the nation's supply chain.
	Anyway, Pete Buttigieg, as well, was admitting over the weekend that there are going to be supply chain problems into next year.
	Well, certainly a lot of the challenges that we've been experiencing this year will continue into next year, but there are both short-term and long-term steps that we can take to do something about it.
	Okay, um, so, that's not great.
	The good news is that Buttigieg was on national TV defending having left his job for two months and nobody noticing.
	As I said last week, if you leave your job for two months and no one even bothers to ask where you are, that means your job is completely superfluous and we should eliminate your entire department.
	I don't even understand how that works.
	If I went absent from this show for a day, I get emails from people who are like, where's the show?
	If my producers just took off for two months at a time, they would no longer work here because that's not a real possibility.
	You can't do that.
	At the very least, you got to delegate it to your to your deputy.
	OK, but here's Pete Buttigieg saying paid family.
	So now he's going to tell us how hard he is working.
	As a father with his co-father husband taking care of babies, Like, again, not to demean family work because, you know, working at home is a thing and being with your kids is definitely a lot of work.
	I just came off a weekend of being with my kids.
	It's a lot.
	But you're being paid to be Secretary of Transportation.
	I don't think anybody, the debate here is not over whether men should spend more time with their kids.
	The debate here is whether the federal government should pay men to spend more time with their kids while completely abdicating their jobs in the middle of an inflationary shipping crisis.
	Here is Pete Buttigieg defending staying home and feeding the babies while completely abdicating his job.
	Paid family leave is important.
	It's important as a matter of family values.
	It's important to our economy.
	And one more thing that I think is maybe underappreciated.
	When somebody welcomes a new child into their family and goes on leave to take care of that child, that's not a vacation.
	It's work.
	It's joyful, wonderful, fulfilling work.
	But it is work, and it's time that our nation join pretty much every other country in the world and recognize that.
	So I noticed that you're getting benefits and living off those benefits, Pete Buttigieg, that I pay for.
	So that's exciting stuff.
	By the way, most major American companies do have some sort of paternity or maternity leave.
	So it's not like Pete Buttigieg is preaching to anybody here.
	He's just growing a third arm to pat himself on the back right here.
	He just has no good answer as to why he just took off for two months.
	So he was asked specifically by Jake Tapper, so why didn't you just appoint an acting secretary?
	Like, you were just gone.
	So The answer here, by the way, is the entire Biden administration should go on paternity leave.
	Like, all of you, just go away.
	The country would be better off if you just left.
	Because all you're doing is sitting around and spending all of our money while patting ourselves on the back for being lazy bums.
	Here's Pete Buttigieg.
	Why didn't you or the Department of Transportation make an official announcement when you went on parental leave, and why did you not appoint an acting secretary while you were away?
	Well, so the way this works is there is a deputy secretary, Polly Trottenberg, who's doing phenomenal work and who, as deputy secretaries do, can fill in when a secretary is not available.
	Now, look, even though I've been on paternity leave and I'm proud of it, obviously given the nature of my job...
	When you take a job like mine, you understand and accept that you're going to have to be available 24-7 depending on what's going on, and you're going to have to engage, and I did.
	Okay, he didn't.
	Literally no one knew he was gone.
	For two months.
	No one knew he was gone.
	Like, that was not a thing.
	And then he tells the final lie again, and this is the one that really matters, which is that we can enervate you into complete compliance, right?
	You shouldn't worry about any of the economic problems you're seeing.
	You shouldn't worry about the inflation.
	You shouldn't worry about the fact nobody's going back to work.
	It's actually good.
	All of this is good.
	Sure, China's firing hypersonic low-orbit missiles to test against the United States.
	And sure, the United States is in a complete state of surrender on the foreign policy stage.
	And sure, we are facing extraordinary rates of inflation.
	We are facing people not going back to work.
	We are facing a completely enervated American public.
	But this is all good, according to Pete Buttigieg.
	Part of what's happening isn't just the supply side, it's the demand side.
	Demand is off the charts.
	Retail sales are through the roof.
	And if you think about those images of ships, for example, waiting at anchor on the West Coast, every one of those ships is full of record amounts of goods that Americans are buying because demand is up, because income is up, because the President has successfully guided this economy out of the teeth of a terrifying recession.
	Okay, is that what's going on right now?
	Is that this Commander-in-Chief has guided the economy out of a terrifying recession?
	Because I'm getting the impression that this Commander-in-Chief is guiding America into a recession for no reason at all, considering we put the entire economy of the United States into an artificial coma for a year.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
	Because again, the promise is, get in the warm bath, slit those wrists, and enjoy yourself as the final days of the Republic play out before you.
	We'll get to more of this in a second.
	I know, depressing message.
	But you know, we got rid of truth, justice, and the American way, so it's a better tomorrow.
	We'll just call that a better tomorrow.
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	All right, we're gonna get to more in just a second.
	First, if you missed the Sunday special yesterday, you need to check it out.
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	Excellent podcast.
	It's called Honestly with Barry Weiss.
	It is always worth the listen.
	We sat down to make sense of everything that is going on today.
	It is truly worth your time.
	We talk about the destruction of the New York Times from within.
	We talk about the need for people on the center left to make common cause with conservatives.
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	Alrighty, so meanwhile, the continued push for workers not to enter the workforce is strong and continuing.
	I mean, it really is.
	So union leaders are now taking advantage of the labor shortage in order to push for quote-unquote higher wages, which of course really means lower real-term wages because all of that cost is going to be passed on to the consumer.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, union leaders are pressing to increase their ranks and secure gains for their members as workers demand more from their employers and companies struggle with labor shortages and snarled supply chains.
	A walkout by production workers for farm and construction machinery company Deere and Company that began on Thursday followed recent stoppages at snack producer Monsley International, commercial truck maker Volvo, and breakfast cereal giant Kellogg.
	Labor leaders elsewhere this year have worked to unionize Starbucks, baristas, and Amazon.com warehouse workers, so far with mixed success.
	Okay, now, the reality is that the militancy of the unionized workers is being forwarded by the fact that the government is paying everybody else to stay home.
	You don't have to kneecap all of the prospective workforce when it turns out that that prospective workforce is happy to stay home and pick up the child tax credit.
	to save a workplace and added staffing.
	Okay, now the reality is that the militancy of the unionized workers is being forwarded by the fact that the government is paying everybody else to stay home.
	You don't have to kneecap all of the prospective workforce when it turns out that that prospective workforce is happy to stay home and pick up the child tax credit.
	So the continued attempt to IV the American public benefits has consequences and Democrats want to do more of this.
	They want more of this.
	As they continue to push forward with this $3.5 trillion budget plan, now they're admitting that they're not going to get to $3.5 trillion.
	But Joe Biden is saying, if we don't get $3.5 trillion now, we'll come back and we'll get back the rest.
	Here is the president of the United States doddering his way through another press conference.
	I told you before what my neurosurgeon years ago said when I had that aneurysm.
	He said, your problem, Senator, is you're a congenital optimist.
	But I'm convinced we're going to get this done.
	I'm convinced we're going to get it done.
	We're not going to get $3.5 trillion.
	We'll get less than that.
	We're going to get it.
	get it and we're going to come back and get the rest.
	And we're going to come back and get the rest.
	So that is Biden undermining his own his own agenda here.
	Right. Because if he actually wants to get a deal done, he can't keep like he keeps doing this over and over.
	But the goal here is the spending.
	The goal here is to change the relationship of Americans to their government. Remember, the reason that they are currently in a budget impasse is because Joe Biden said that he wanted to pair the infrastructure bill with the budget bill.
	He said, okay, we can whittle down the infrastructure bill, but everything that doesn't go in the infrastructure bill, we'll put in the budget bill.
	And then Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were like, nope, we're not going to do that.
	Now Joe Biden is saying, okay, so we paired down the infrastructure bill.
	Everything that doesn't go in there is going to go in the budget bill.
	Now we're going to pair down the budget bill.
	Everything that doesn't go in there is going to go in a third bill.
	If you keep saying this, all you're doing is prolonging the crisis inside your own party.
	So Democrats will come up with some big spending plan here, obviously.
	I can't imagine that they get all the way to the end of the year and they have not passed something.
	They have to pass something.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, Democrats are still tussling over how to scale back their ambitions to expand the country's social benefits and overhaul its climate change policy, and they are facing dwindling time to reach an agreement as both the House and the Senate return to Washington this week.
	One major element related to climate change, a $150 billion program aimed at pushing utilities to draw more power from clean energy sources, could be cut from the bill because Senator Joe Manchin, of course, comes from West Virginia, which is a coal state.
	He is saying, I don't want incentives that tell people not to use coal.
	Instead, what they're probably going to do is create incentives for individuals to use alternative sources of power.
	But he doesn't want coal plants punished, per se.
	And so they'll probably figure out a different way of doing that.
	Mired in internal policy disagreements, Democrats early this month passed a short-term extension of highway funding until the end of October, setting up a new deadline for much of Biden's legislative agenda.
	While passing the Democrats' marquee package won't be feasible by month's end, the timing has renewed pressure on Democrats to reach a rough consensus regarding its parameters.
	Remember, they only have until the beginning of December to finish all of this and then they run up against the debt ceiling again.
	And this time, Republicans ain't going to help them.
	Republicans are going to be able to say, listen, we helped you last time.
	We pushed it off for like a month and a half.
	You still couldn't get it done.
	It's now on you.
	The proposed benefits for families with children, including subsidized childcare, an extension of an expanded child tax credit, and universal pre-K for three and four-year-old children are tangled up in the broader fight within Congress.
	In his remarks on Friday, Biden expressed doubts about whether the final package would include all of the funding he wanted for community colleges.
	Democrats plan to advance the social policy package through a process that allows them to skirt GOP opposition in the Senate, but Manchin and Sinema are basically in control over there.
	Asked on Sunday on CNN about Joe Manchin's objections to all of the climate change garbage, Pete Buttigieg said the administration remains committed to climate action, quote, exactly what legislative form this takes is what's being negotiated right now.
	But the bottom line is we have to act on climate for the good of our children.
	And by the way, for the good of our economy, which of course is false.
	They're not doing any of this for the good of our economy.
	So the Democrats continue, again, to push this radical redefinition of what it means to be an American.
	This radical redefinition of the relationship between you and the government.
	The New York Times openly says that the Biden administration is pushing cradle-to-grave government programming.
	How much of that are they going to get?
	The answer is more than they would if there were Republicans in charge.
	Maybe it's incremental for them, but that is certainly the goal.
	And to disconnect that from the giant culture war we are currently having over the future of the United States and whether the United States ought to even exist as a country proud of itself, ready to fight for its own values on the world stage, There is a relationship between those two things.
	And that relationship is going to define whether the United States has a future or whether, in fact, it does not.
	All righty.
	We'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
	In the meantime, go check out the Michael Knowles show today.
	He discusses Delta ditching their vaccine mandate.
	You can hear more details about that story over on Michael's show that's available right now.
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	The Transportation Secretary remains missing in action on paternity leave.
	Inflation hits a 13-year high and a major airline ditches its vaccine mandate.

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