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Jan. 24, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:29
The Rain In Ukraine Falls Mainly Because Of Joe's Brain | Ep. 1418
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Joe Biden reportedly begins the evacuation of Ukraine.
Plus, members of the central left are beginning to wake up to the COVID control scam, but the public health bureaucracy can't let go.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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So Joe Biden's poll numbers are just absolutely abysmal.
They continue to be abysmal.
Even a new Fox News poll that shows Joe Biden up at 47%.
In terms of approval rating, still finds that about 60% of Americans don't want him to run again.
52% disapprove of his handling of COVID.
Only 46% approve.
58% disapprove of Joe Biden on the economy.
54% disapprove of him on foreign policy.
On border security, 59% disapprove.
Only 37% approve.
on foreign policy.
On border security, 59% disapprove, only 37% approve.
And asked who they would vote for if the 2024 presidential election were held today, only 36% said they would vote for Joe Biden, 60%...
60% said they would definitely or probably vote for someone else.
These are abysmal numbers for the current president of the United States.
By the way, Kamala Harris's numbers are no better.
She is at 43% approval rating.
And right now, the survey asks about generic congressional ballot, if the election for Congress were held today, who they would vote for.
Republicans narrowly edge out the Democrats 44 to 43.
What that really means, because people don't like saying that they are going to vote for the Republican Party, is that Republicans in a wipeout.
This poll, by the way, is actually one of the stronger polls for Joe Biden of recent measure.
A lot of the other polls have him down in the mid to low 30s.
And the media are beginning to catch on to this.
Chuck Todd over at NBC News, he says that Joe Biden is no longer seen as competent or effective.
Yeah, no joke there.
President Biden's news conference on Wednesday was designed to kick off a second-year reset of his presidency.
Cap recaptures political identity, if you will, but our new NBC News poll suggests Mr. Biden does need a reset because he's lost his identity a bit.
He's no longer seen as competent and effective.
He's no longer seen as a good commander-in-chief or perhaps most damaging as easygoing and likable.
In fact, just 5% of adults say Mr. Biden has performed better than expected as president.
Okay, when Chuck Todd is off the Biden train, that train is just derailed.
There's no one left on the train.
It is off the tracks like in The Fugitive.
Harrison Ford is running away from it and is going right into a ravine.
It is a bad situation for the Biden administration.
The only funny part about that quote from Chuck Todd is that he thinks that Joe Biden was ever seen as radically competent or effective.
He was seen as not Donald Trump.
That is not the same thing as being seen as competent or effective.
Meanwhile, over on CBS, they're having the same experience.
They had a focus group.
Participants were asked whether they think that America is better off for the last year under Joe Biden.
It went very, very poorly, again, for Joe Biden in this CBS focus group.
During the course of the pandemic, we've been listening to Americans through Zoom to get their thoughts on COVID, the economy, and how the government is handling it all.
On Friday, we checked back in with six of them.
Who feels like we are in a better place now than we were a year ago?
Show of hands.
No one believes we're in a better spot now.
Well, that's not great for Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, the person who's coming under fire because somebody needs to come under fire for this.
If you're the Biden administration, someone has to go under that bus.
The person who's being criticized most often is Ron Klain.
Ron Klain is the current White House chief of staff.
There are actually a couple of them.
He is the radical chief of staff.
He spends all day on Twitter.
For all the talk about how Trump was constantly on Twitter, Ron Klain is just a Twitter devotee.
He spends all day long just retweeting allies of President Biden and trying to tweet his way through it.
It's become sort of an internet meme.
When Joe Biden has a bad day, which these days is every single day, Ron Klain has to tweet his way through it.
He just has to spend his days trying to get through that.
Well, Howie Kurtz reported over on Fox News that Joe Biden is now offering to do interviews on behalf of Ron Klain.
That is always a very bad sign for you.
When things are going so badly that your boss is having to come out and say that he has your back, and your boss is the President of the United States, that means you are doing a terrible job.
So here's Howie Kurtz reporting this one.
Ron Klain knew, based on my reporting, when he took this job that this day would come, that he knew that the low poll numbers and the voting rights defeat would make him a target.
He kind of looks at it as like being an NFL coach, where you turn on talk radio, everyone's talking about all the stupid things that you did.
And he's consulted with former chiefs of staff.
I can report that President Biden has seen this coverage, that he's backing his top aide, and that he's offered to do interviews on Klain's behalf.
Okay, that's hysterically funny.
First of all, it's bad politics.
If one of your advisors has become the face of your failure, and you have the ability as President of the United States to take that person out of the rotation, and then to say, listen, we'll keep Ron around because we still think he has valuable advice to offer, but we've decided to shift directions.
I mean, if Joe Biden wishes to save his presidency, he needs to make moves, like actually moving Ron Klain out of a position of influence.
Instead, Ron Klain is still online tweeting, like right now.
He just retweeted, for example, Benji Sarlin.
Benji Sarlin is a reporter over at NBC News, of course.
He's the policy editor.
And he retweeted a tweet from Benji Sarlin and Ron Klain.
In which Sarlin quoted Joe Biden saying to the US Conference of Mayors that they would increase funding for the cops.
And Sarlin tweeted, this is the latest in a long series.
Biden is actually saying the thing.
Pundits constantly say he should, and it probably doesn't matter all that much.
And Ron Klain is tweeting that.
Because the thing is that Ron Klain doesn't actually want Joe Biden to tweet or say these moderate things, right?
Ron Klain wants him to say the radical thing, but there is Joe Biden trying to defend Ron Klain, which is...
A power move from a guy who is in the mid-30s in terms of approval ratings, according to half the polls.
Meanwhile, Jen Psaki is trying to quiet the base.
One of the big problems for the Democrats is a lot of Democrats are off the Biden train.
Jen Psaki told them over the weekend, you know, go have a margarita, go for a spin.
The cultural bubble in which these folks live is truly incredible.
They think that the vast majority of their patrons are people who have margaritas and go to kickboxing class.
Here is Jen Psaki.
My advice to everyone out there who's frustrated, sad, angry, pissed off, feel those emotions, go to a kickboxing class, have a margarita, do whatever you need to do this weekend, and then wake up on Monday morning, we gotta keep fighting.
Okay, I'm just gonna point out that the vast majority of people who follow politics in the United States are not single women who live on the set of Sex and the City.
Have a margarita and go to a kickbox.
What does she think people do on the weekends?
It is such a bubble.
Well, here is the thing.
When it comes to domestic policy, the President of the United States does not have plenary authority.
Joe Biden has been stifled in his attempts to pass, for example, Build Back Better because Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin aren't willing to kill the filibuster.
He's been stifled in his attempt to rejigger the entire American voting system because, again, he can't kill the filibuster.
The President of the United States is checked by the Supreme Court.
So the VAX mandate gets struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States.
He's checked by the legislature.
If they decide not to fund him, he can't do the things he wants to do.
There's one area where the President of the United States does have extraordinary authority, which means You really can't judge the success of a presidency by the stuff that he can do.
It's very difficult to judge a president by the stuff he can't do.
The stuff that Joe Biden has already done on domestic policy has been a disaster area.
And whether it is inflating the currency via his massive spending binges, or whether it is his failed attempts to crack down on COVID by essentially restricting blue states while red states go about their business.
All of that's been a failure.
But, again, not all domestic failure can be based on the President of the United States, because the President of the United States is not the only player in this space.
However, on foreign policy, he basically is.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces has almost unlimited authority on foreign policy.
Especially because the legislature has, over the course of the last several generations, completely abdicated its own authority.
If you read the Constitution of the United States, it says that you are supposed to go to Congress for a declaration of war.
We have not actually had a declaration of war in this country, like a full-scale declaration of war since World War II.
There was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that gave the President of the United States the authority to do certain military actions.
There was the AUMF, the Authorization for Use of Military Force in 2002 with regard to Afghanistan, which was not a full-scale declaration of war.
We do not have declarations of war in this country to the point where in the early 1970s, The Congress of the United States passed something called the War Powers Act, which said that the President of the United States, because he needs to sometimes get involved in foreign conflicts, he has to come inform us within 60 days and we have to decide whether we wish to continue greenlighting this thing.
But the reality is that over the course of the last half century or three quarters of a century, nearly all foreign policy power has moved over from the legislative branch to the executive branch.
It used to be split.
It is no longer split, which means that what happens on foreign policy is 100% squarely in the lap of the president of the United States.
And this is the part of Trump's record that never gets commented upon because this part of his record was actually quite good.
If you look at Donald Trump's record with regard to the Middle East, he actually had breakthrough peace agreements for the first time in a generation and a half.
Donald Trump's record on China was much stronger than his predecessor, Barack Obama's.
Donald Trump's record on Russia, by the way, was much stronger than Barack Obama's record on Russia.
All the media could say is that Donald Trump was a tool of Vladimir Putin, which made it very weird that Vladimir Putin did not invade surrounding areas during Trump's presidency.
Remember that he invaded Crimea while Barack Obama was President of the United States.
And he invaded Georgia while George W. Bush was President of the United States.
And he didn't really invade anywhere, so far as I can recall, while Donald Trump was President of the United States.
So the supposed Kremlin tool was actually not that good of a Kremlin tool.
But Joe Biden has been an excellent Kremlin tool, and a tool of the Chinese.
Here's the thing about foreign policy.
Very often people think on foreign policy that it basically comes down to where are we willing to put American troops, and we shouldn't be willing to put American troops anywhere that is not basically American territory.
That if anywhere on earth gets attacked, and the United States is not directly implicated, this means we have no interest.
This is not how foreign policy works.
The reason foreign policy does not work this way is because foreign policy is largely a game of trying to look five, ten years down the road and see who your enemies are and to thwart their ambitions because you don't want to fight them when they're big, you want to fight them when they're small.
This has always been a part of American foreign policy and if you look at the history of American foreign policy, when the United States goes to sleep, bad things happen.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so, when it comes to American foreign policy, if you look at the history of American foreign policy, whenever we go to sleep, something really bad happens.
So, at the very end of World War I, for example, a fight broke out, you'll recall, in Russia between the Reds and the Whites, and the United States and Britain actually put a very small contingent of troops In northern Russia, in order to help the white Russians, who were sort of the less communist Russians, led by a man named Alexander Kerensky, they were trying to help the white Russians fight back against the predations of the Bolsheviks.
And there was very little domestic support in either the United States or Britain for this.
And so the West essentially abandoned Russia to its fate.
And for the next 70 years, Russia was the scourge of the West.
The Soviet Union basically Lead to the creation of World War II.
There's a very good book out right now called Stalin's War talking about how World War II was, it's largely perceived as only Hitler's war.
It really wasn't.
It was also manipulated by Stalin.
And bottom line is this, preventative action is a lot cheaper than fighting giant world wars.
The United States slashed its military between World War I and World War II to the point where by World War II, the United States' military ranked 19th in the world in military strength, just below that of the Philippines.
It turns out that that was an invitation to aggression by the Japanese in the east and by the Germans in the west.
Right, the same thing happens over and over and over.
Whenever the United States cuts its defense, America's enemies take advantage of this.
This happened during the 1990s.
When the United States cut its defenses, believing that the Cold War was over and it was time to retrench, Al Qaeda got very strong and started striking out at American targets, culminating in 9-11.
So it's all fun and games.
It's very easy to talk about the post-Vietnam syndrome and this belief that America's military should not intervene anywhere on earth.
The problem is that our enemies don't have exactly the same sorts of concerns.
Our enemies don't care.
In fact, our enemies look at a weak United States on the global stage and they start getting aggressive.
And essentially they're like Hans Gruber in Die Hard.
Remember Hans Gruber, the You criminal and diehard.
There's a scene where he is talking on the walkie-talkie with John McClane and he's threatening to execute.
One of the, one of the hostages.
And he says to, he finally does execute one of the hostages.
And then he says to John McClain, eventually I will get to somebody you do care about.
And this is true with America's enemies.
Eventually they will get to something we care about.
They already moved on Hong Kong a couple of years ago and nobody in the West batted an eye because the United States and Britain, they basically surrendered Hong Kong the minute in the late nineties, they decided to transition power over to the Chinese.
Hong Kong was eventually going to become an Essentially just a pawn of the Chinese government at that point.
Everybody knew it, but they wanted to pretend that the Chinese government was somehow trustworthy, which is insane.
And now you have the Chinese who are threatening the Australians in the South and they're threatening Taiwan.
And in fact, there's a story out today.
that the Chinese just flew another 39 warplanes toward Taiwan in their largest display of power in the new year, continuing a pattern that caused the island to scramble its own jets in response.
The formation of 39 jets on Sunday night, according to Sky News, included 24 J-16 fighter jets and 10 J-10 jets, among other support and electronic warfare aircraft, according to Taiwan's defense ministry.
Taiwan's Air Force tracked the People's Liberation Army planes on its air defense radar systems It added, Chinese pilots have been flying toward Taiwan on a near-daily basis during the past year and a half since Taiwan's government started publishing the data.
The largest sortie was 56 warplanes on a single day last October.
The activity has generally been in the airspace southwest of Taiwan.
This is the Air Defense Identification Zone or airspace it monitors out of national security considerations.
And this particular action came a day after the United States and Japanese navies put on a show of force in the Philippine Sea.
It included two U.S.
Navy aircraft carriers, two American amphibious assault ships, and a Japanese helicopter destroyer.
So tensions have been ratcheting up.
And the reason the tensions have been ratcheting up pretty obviously is because Joe Biden is an idiot and decided to, with no reason whatsoever, pull out of Afghanistan, leaving the entire country to the rotations of the Taliban.
By the way, there's still Americans who are stuck behind enemy lines over there.
The State Department has been happy talking this thing and pretending that everybody who wanted to get out got out.
That is not true.
There are at least 100 Americans who are still stuck behind enemy lines.
They can't find their way out because as it turns out, they're basically being held hostage by the Taliban.
Why should the Taliban let them out?
The Taliban is in control of the country.
19 million people are probably Well, 19 million women are living under the absolute sex slavery of the Taliban regime, and millions of people will probably die over the course of this winter.
And this is the talk from the United Nations.
This is all on Joe Biden.
Remember, Joe Biden has plenary authority over foreign policy.
Pulling out of Afghanistan, surrendering in Afghanistan to the Taliban directly, and you can get a delay.
By the way, there are new documents demonstrating that Joe Biden was warned months in advance that this is precisely what was going to happen if we completely undercut the air support that we were providing for the Afghan national government.
Joe Biden knew that.
He didn't care.
He wanted to get out by September 11th.
He did.
13 American service people were murdered on the way out.
Hundreds of Americans were caught behind enemy lines.
And Afghans were falling off American wheel wells as we flew planes out of Afghanistan.
And now the entire country is in control of the town.
So if you're Russia, what do you do?
If you're Russia, the first thing you do is you look at Joe Biden and you realize that he is a weak-kneed, scrawny thing of a president.
And you run directly over him.
And that is precisely what is happening in Ukraine right now.
So Joe Biden, again, happy talk is not a strategy.
Happy talk is a coping mechanism.
So here is Joe Biden trying to happy talk his way through the disaster in Ukraine.
He says, we are now positioned better globally than we have been in a very long time.
If by better he means significantly worse, then I suppose that's true.
As a result of the progress we've made, record economic growth, record job growth, faster economic recovery than any other nation on earth, we are better positioned globally than we have been in a long, long time.
No, we definitely, definitely, definitely are not.
We 100% are not.
Okay, so, Joe Biden announced over the weekend that the United States would begin evacuations in Ukraine.
So it'll be great.
Every few months here, under this administration, we can have a Fall of Saigon moment in which a helicopter takes off from the top of an embassy.
According to the Associated Press, the State Department on Sunday ordered the families of all American personnel at the U.S.
Embassy in Ukraine to leave the country amid heightened fears of a Russian invasion.
The department told the dependents of staffers at the U.S.
Embassy in Kiev that they must leave the country.
It also said that non-essential embassy staff could leave Ukraine at government expense.
The move came amid rising tensions about Russia's military buildup on the Ukraine border that were not eased during talks on Friday between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva.
State Department officials stressed the Kiev embassy will remain open and that the announcement does not constitute an evacuation.
The move had been under consideration for some time.
It does not reflect an easing of U.S.
support for Ukraine, said the official.
That's weird, because Joe Biden said literally last week that if Vladimir Putin walks across the border and starts to carve out minor incursions, he won't do anything, prompting Vladimir Zelensky, the current president of Ukraine, to say there's no such thing as a minor incursion into the sovereign territory of a nation, which, of course, is true.
By the way, the State Department announcing this doesn't constitute an evacuation does not mean it's not an evacuation.
Why are people leaving if it's not an evacuation?
Do you normally just leave your place of work?
Is that a thing you typically do in the absence of any danger?
If your boss says, I need you to leave your workplace right now.
Go home immediately.
Don't worry, it's not an evacuation.
I just need you to go home because there are people who are about to march across the border wearing different uniforms.
That sound like an evacuation to you?
Because that is textbook dictionary definition, evacuation.
In a State Department statement, they noted recent reports that Russia was planning significant military action against Ukraine.
However, the Russian Foreign Ministry has accused NATO countries of escalating tensions around Ukraine with disinformation.
Which, of course, is insane.
Nobody actually wants some sort of conflict with Russia.
The Russians use disinformation as a regular tool of what they do when it comes to foreign policy.
The State Department added, quote, "...the security conditions, particularly along Ukraine's borders in Russia-occupied Crimea and in Russia-controlled eastern Ukraine, are unpredictable and can deteriorate with little notice.
Demonstrations which have turned violent at times regularly occur throughout Ukraine, including in Kiev." Also, the department issued a travel advisory.
They said, "...do not travel to Ukraine due to the increased threat of Russian military action and COVID-19." And COVID-19!
Oh, the State Department.
It's not that Vladimir Putin is a threatening invasion of the country.
You might have to worry about Omicron, guys.
Exercise increased caution in Ukraine due to crime and civil unrest.
Some areas have increased risk.
The travel advisory for Russia was also changed, and they also blamed the situation in Ukraine plus COVID-19, the all-purpose cover for we suck at our jobs.
By the way, the State Department is now openly advising people, quote, Given that the president has said military action by Russia could come at any time, the U.S.
government will not be in a position to evacuate U.S.
citizens.
So U.S.
citizens currently present in Ukraine should plan accordingly.
Arrange commercial flights.
Arrange commercial flights.
Yeah, this is gonna go well.
So yeah, forget... I mean, we'll leave you there and figure out your own way home.
Grab yourself a JetBlue seat.
It'll be fine, probably.
There's some open wheel wells.
If you really need to get out, there's some wheel wells attached to our planes.
You know, hold on as long as you can.
This administration is a bleep show.
It is a bleep show.
And everyone knows it.
In a second, we'll get to Joe Biden's new proposed response.
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Okay, so now Joe Biden is considering deploying thousands of troops to Eastern Europe and This should have been done months ago.
It should have been done months ago.
Joe Biden became president in January 2021 and proceeded to do pretty much nothing.
Pretty much nothing.
Here's the thing about deterrence.
Deterrence only works when you have credible threat of the use of force.
That threat is only credible when one of two things is true.
Either you have tripwires everywhere, meaning that if somebody stumbles across the tripwire, bad things happen.
This is why we have American forces still present in South Korea, for example.
It doesn't rely on the American president to make a statement that if North Korea crosses the border into South Korea, the U.S.
will get involved.
We have American troops directly in harm's way.
So if they do that, If they cross that border, Americans will die, and the United States President and Congress will basically be obligated to get involved.
It's that simple.
There are two things you can do.
You can do that, the tripwire system, or you have to have a president who is so intimidating that everyone just knows that if you cross him, he will break you.
Does Joe Biden sound like that kind of president?
So we didn't have the tripwires, and we also have a weakling for a president.
And Russia knows this.
So, too little too late, the United States is trying to pour resources into the region as a deterrent.
Again, the goal of putting troops in Eastern Europe is not because you want to go to war with Russia, it's because you don't want to go to war with Russia.
It turns out a great strategy for getting yourself into a war in Europe, an excellent strategy for getting yourself into a war, is to keep surrendering chunks of land to an autocratic regime.
We have a fairly long history of this in Europe, and as it turns out, all over the globe.
Surrender is not actually a strategy.
Surrender is a strategy for emboldening your enemies so they move on to the next thing that they want.
Deterrence is an excellent strategy for getting people to back off.
And the way you get them to back off is either you are very intimidating as a human, or two, you have put a bunch of tripwires all over the place.
Joe Biden did none of that.
So now he's trying to backfill this.
So he's simultaneously weak By evacuating all the embassies in Ukraine, and by getting Americans out, and then by telling everybody, hey, find yourself a commercial flight.
And at the same time, I'm going to backfill sanctions, I'm going to backfill putting troops in Eastern Europe.
If you're Vladimir Putin, now the ante has been up to the point where you almost can't afford, for domestic political reasons, not to cross that border.
If Putin doesn't do it now, now it looks like he's been backed down by Biden.
So, this is why the Biden administration pretty openly thinks that Putin's going to cross that border at some point in the very near future.
According to the New York Times, President Biden is considering deploying several thousand U.S.
troops, as well as warships and aircraft to NATO allies in the Baltics and Eastern Europe.
An expansion of American military involvement had been mounting fears of a Russian incursion into Ukraine, according to administration officials.
The move would signal a major pivot for the Biden administration, which up until recently was taking a restrained stance on Ukraine out of fear of provoking Russia into invading.
But as President Putin has been ramping up his threatening actions towards Ukraine, and talks between American and Russian officials have failed to discourage him, the administration is now moving away from its do-not-provoke strategy.
In a meeting on Saturday at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, senior Pentagon officials presented Biden with many options that would shift America's military assets much closer to Putin's doorstep.
The options include sending 1,000 to 5,000 troops to Eastern European countries, with the potential to increase that number tenfold if things deteriorate.
Officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly about internal deliberations.
Biden is expected to make a decision as early as this week, they said.
He is weighing the buildup as Russia has escalated its menacing posture against Ukraine, including amassing more than 100,000 troops and weaponry on the border and stationing Russian forces in Belarus.
On Saturday, Britain accused Moscow of developing plans to install a pro-Russia leader in Ukraine.
So Anthony Blinken talked about this over the weekend.
He said there are two paths for Russia diplomacy or massive consequences.
We've given Russia two paths.
There's the path of diplomacy and dialogue, one that I engaged in with Foreign Minister Lavrov just last week in Geneva.
But there's also a path of its renewed aggression and massive consequences that we have been building now for many weeks.
Okay, so does anyone actually think that there will be massive consequences?
The Russians don't think that.
They think this is all a bluff.
Because why wouldn't they think that?
What Biden is really talking about doing here is putting a bunch of troops in NATO obligated countries.
NATO currently has 30 members.
The member countries include places like all the places that we're talking about Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, right?
All these places are members of NATO.
Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
So Putin Wanted to guarantee that they would never become a member of NATO because Ukraine had been making pro-Western moves over the course of the last couple of decades to separate itself from Russia.
Russia doesn't want that to happen, and so they've been trying to dissuade the West from allowing those sorts of moves.
Now, there really isn't an active NATO application on the board from Ukraine, so really what this is is just an empty threat so that Vladimir Putin has a pretext to invade the country and just claw it back.
When you have a failing regime internally, which is what Russia is, Russia is not even a second rate power, it really is a third rate power at this point in time.
It's only major resource is natural gas that it's exporting out to Europe, but other than that it has a completely failed economy run by oligarchs.
So, what do you do if you're Vladimir Putin?
You have to get aggressive on your borders.
It really is the only choice.
Putting a bunch of troops in NATO countries isn't going to scare Putin about Ukraine.
All it's going to do is it means that he doesn't, right now, invade Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, right?
The actual NATO members.
Because that would provoke a response.
But NATO is quite fractured over what to do here.
And that's the fault not just of Joe Biden, but the Europeans.
This is in Europe, right?
I mean, the United States is in the United States, last time I checked the map, and Europe is in Europe.
And if Europe can't get its act together, that makes it very difficult for the United States to take strong action in places like Ukraine.
None of the military options being considered include deploying additional troops to Ukraine itself.
Biden has made clear he is loathe to enter another conflict following America's painful exit from Afghanistan.
So really, what is this?
It's a bunch of military posturing in countries that are not Ukraine while we surrender Ukraine to Vladimir Putin, who will consolidate the territory, and then he will bide his time.
But here's the thing.
There are other countries on Earth that are looking with hungry eyes at other surrounding territories.
There's a reason that China is performing military exercises in increased fashion over Taiwan.
If you're China, do you wait until there's another president?
Really, if you want to do something about Taiwan, do you wait until there's another president?
Or do you just make the move?
You have like a million more men than women in China.
You have an extraordinarily powerful military.
You know that there will be heavy costs to invading Taiwan, but you also know that the United States is not going to allow itself to be drawn directly into a conflict over Taiwan.
So if you're looking at Joe Biden, who is a weakling, what stops you exactly?
And this is the thing about foreign policy.
Again, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not about Ukraine.
It is not about Taiwan.
It's about what they take next, because eventually they will be consolidating power and they will come after something you do care about.
By the way, we should care about Taiwan, considering that semiconductors are largely produced in Taiwan.
That if you actually want the stuff in your home to work, you actually need those semiconductors.
Like, there's a point that the historian Neil Ferguson has made.
He said the next war, you know, resources in the past, resource wars have been fought over things like oil and fought over coal, if you go back historically.
But the new resource war is technology.
And a lot of that technology is centered in border areas where our enemies are very, very aggressive.
Now, again, the Biden administration trying to happy talk its way through this.
John Kirby of the Pentagon, he says, well, you know, if Russia does invade Ukraine, it won't have many friends.
Well, I'm sure that's going to scare the living tar out of Vladimir Putin.
I'm sure he's just up nights about his friendship circle.
If in fact they commit another incursion into Ukrainian territory, they're just going to set themselves up for even more isolation from the rest of the international community.
This is not a country that has a whole lot of friends.
This is not a country that has allies and partners to lean on the way we do, the way the West does.
Okay, so we will see if there is any strength enough to dissuade Putin from walking across the border.
In the meantime, it is being reported that Vladimir Putin's actual plan here is to keep taking pieces and pieces and pieces and then trying to install a pro-Russia leader in Ukraine.
So this is what the UK has been reporting.
Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, echoed that message over the weekend.
Let's start with that new British intelligence that the Russian government is planning to install a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine.
Does the U.S.
agree with that view?
Well, Dan, I can't comment on specific pieces of intelligence, but you know, we've been warning about just this kind of tactic for weeks, and we've spoken to that publicly.
And just last week, we sanctioned four agents of Russia, Ukrainians, in Ukraine, seeking to destabilize the government.
So this is very much part of the Russian toolkit.
It runs the gamut from a large conventional incursion or invasion of Ukraine to these kind of destabilizing activities in an attempt to topple the government.
Now again, all of this coming from Russia is a direct result of perceived weakness in the West.
It is that simple.
That's what this really is about.
And that is an astonishing thing.
It's an astonishing thing.
It didn't have to be this way.
If you're Ukraine and you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars paying Hunter Biden and all you got was this crappy Russian t-shirt, you should be pissed as well.
If you drop bags of cash with the Biden family and all you get for your trouble is Vladimir Putin on your doorstep knocking and Joe Biden evacuating personnel while putting troops in Belarus, yeah man, that is a raw deal for you if you are Ukraine.
Again, if you're Taiwan, see this is the thing.
The more of these sorts of incursions that happen, the more of this that happens, the more you will get a better chance of pro-America's enemies regimes being installed in these places.
Because let's say you're Taiwan, and you know that if it really comes down to it, the West is not going to help you.
The West is rearming you to the extent that they can raise the cost for China incrementally, but they're really not going to do anything.
In the end, if China wishes to take Taiwan, China will take Taiwan, and the West has made it clear they will do nothing.
I mean, that's what happened over Hong Kong.
If you know that, and at a certain point the population is going to say, is it really worth it?
What if we just became friendly with Chinese?
This is precisely what happened in Hong Kong.
I mean, they actually did a Reagan election.
They pretended that they won.
They didn't really win.
Why wouldn't the same thing happen in Ukraine?
Why wouldn't you have some of the bad old guys come back in, the Yanukovychs of the world, come back in at the behest of Vladimir Putin and take over the country again?
The problem is that now we are at the point Where we are close to put up or shut up time.
So, it never should have gotten to this point.
It never should have gotten to this point.
This is the outgrowth of the grand strategy of the Biden administration, which is to retrench on foreign policy.
That strategy has been a massive failure and we are just a year into this garbage administration.
Alrighty, in just one second, we'll get to the latest on COVID.
So, the reports are out.
Omicron has basically ended the pandemic.
This is according to the WHO.
The WHO literally put out a report in the New York Times today saying that Omicron, because it has hit a huge number of people and is killing very few of those people on an infection fatality rate basis, that the pandemic is coming to an end.
Our public health bureaucracy cannot, will not let it go.
We'll get to that in a moment.
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So meanwhile, Joe Biden's handling of the pandemic has been disastrous, mainly because they just refuse to acknowledge the reality, which is that the pandemic for the vast majority of people is over.
And when I say it is over, I don't mean that Omicron isn't killing people.
It is killing some people.
I'm not saying that Omicron isn't hitting people.
It's hitting nearly everybody.
What I mean is that how you choose to react to Omicron is up to you, and it is up to your local politicians, and your state politicians, and your federal politicians.
So, Barry Weiss, of former New York Times fame and Substack fame.
Barry Weiss was on Bill Maher's show over the weekend.
And Barry made the perfectly obvious point that she hangs out with liberals all day, which she does.
She lives in a very blue area.
Barry is not conservative.
She is an anti-radical left liberal, sort of Andrew Sullivan mode, sort of in the mode of some of the members of the intellectual dark web.
And Barry Weiss, she came out and she said, this pandemic policy will be remembered as a catastrophic moral failure.
You will realize, most importantly, that this is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.
The city of Flint, Michigan, which is 80%, I think, minority students, has just announced indefinite virtual schooling.
In the past two years, we've seen, among young girls, a 51% increase in self-harm.
People are killing themselves.
They are anxious.
They are depressed.
They are lonely.
That is why we need to end it, more than any inconvenience that it's been to the rest of us.
Okay, she's right about this.
Now, hilariously, there are some people on the right who are very critical of Barry because the outpouring was very pro-Barry online.
Okay, here's the thing, guys.
Take your allies where you can get them.
It doesn't mean that folks who have been center-left on this issue have been right the whole pandemic.
They have not been.
People who were left at the beginning of the pandemic and were suggesting that we needed to lock down interminably, and then particularly people who were left after the vaccines were available, who've been following the fauci's of the world, got it wrong nearly the entire time they got it wrong.
Okay, but Now that the worm is turning, don't start saying that it's bad for people to join the club.
It is good for people to join the club.
Of course this policy has been massively destructive and must never be allowed to happen again.
But here is the thing.
The public health bureaucracy will not allow it to stop.
They won't allow it to stop.
Now, down here in Florida, things have been normal for, what, a year, a year and a half?
Like, people have been acting like normal for a year and a half.
Particularly if you're young and healthy, people have just been going out and living their lives.
If you were 20 years old and healthy in Florida, the pandemic lasted for about three weeks.
In terms of your personal behavior.
The first three weeks you were freaked out, and then you realized it was hitting a bunch of old people, and you were like, okay, if I don't hang out with old people and I hang out with my friends, I'm fine.
Okay, that was the mentality in Florida.
And then once the vaccines were available, the mentality was, I'm done.
We are finished.
I remember last Passover, there was basically a fairly open, unmasked party.
You know, that was like March of last year because the vaccines were now widely available to everyone and everyone felt safe because they should feel safe because the vaccines were effective in preventing hospitalization and death.
We are now like almost a year past that.
Almost a year past that.
And still, the left will not let go, only in blue areas.
I'm just amazed by this.
I told you last week about a Paul Krugman column in the New York Times, in which he was talking about how, you know, it's because of red state failures to abide by our strictures that Omicron continues.
And it's like, dude, what's slowing down the country is you.
What is slowing down the country is COVID paranoia.
According to the Wall Street Journal, quote, schools may be open, but they're struggling.
But here's the thing, I kind of noticed that this is relegated mostly to blue areas.
Here's what they say.
Schools should be open, pandemic or not, much of the public says.
If only they all had what they need to function.
Students at New York City's elite Brooklyn Technical High School played hangman in psychology class recently while a substitute sat behind the teacher's desk.
They were eager to prepare for a coming midterm exam, but their usual instructor was out sick again.
Everyone's kind of freaking out, said DeliaMarcus17.
We haven't really learned anything.
The fast-spreading Omicron variant of COVID-19 has dealt a fresh pandemic blow to Brooklyn Tech, one of the nation's largest high schools, with more than 5,800 students and among the most competitive, with an admission rate under 10%.
The problem there, and in many other schools, boils down to a mismatch between demand and supply.
While many officials and parents nationwide push to keep kids in schools and away from remote learning, Omicron has left many schools short of the essentials needed to operate like teachers, substitutes, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and sometimes students themselves.
Teachers say they struggle to teach in classrooms while also delivering remote lessons to students who can't attend because they tested positive or were near someone who did.
And yet the left can't let it go.
They just cannot.
So Kathy Hochul up in New York, she's still defending mask mandates for kids based on nothing, based on zero things.
It's crazy.
Here she is.
I know people are tired, but I also I'll say one thing about the kids.
My daughter had a meltdown over having to put sneakers on to go to kindergarten.
She got used to wearing sneakers in school.
They just, they adapt better than adults do.
And I'm really proud of the parents who made sure that their kids understood this is for their safety and got it done.
Okay, this is insane.
I'm sorry.
Kids do not adjust better than adults do to things like wearing masks.
And if they do, it is because they have now imbibed the insanity from their parents and their grandparents.
I don't know what kind of society sacrifices the future and the current welfare of their children on behalf of the 80-year-olds.
I don't know what kind of society does that to prevent, to pretend that it is the kids who are the danger to a society where everyone is now having Omicron unmasked and the kids are the least vulnerable is totally crazy.
But again, the public health bureaucracy can't let go because to let go would be to acknowledge that they got it wrong in the first place.
So you still have Anthony Fauci out there.
I don't know why he's still out there.
He's still saying, don't get overconfident.
Why is anyone listening to this dunderhead?
Why?
He's been wrong every step of this pandemic.
It's amazing.
Ultimately, they're all going to go in the same direction.
There may be a bit more pain and suffering with hospitalizations in those areas of the country that have not been fully vaccinated or have not gotten boosters.
But we do know, and these are the recent data that have come out from the CDC, that even with Omicron, boosting makes a major, major difference in protecting you from hospitalization and severe outcomes.
So things are looking good.
We don't want to get overconfident.
But they look like they're going in the right direction right now.
We don't want to get overconfident.
We never want to get overconfident.
We can't get overconfident.
I mean, like, what in the hell?
What in the hell?
You couldn't control this thing the entire time?
Can't get overconfident.
Meanwhile, Biden's CDC director is still telling people that fully vaccinated now means boosted.
That's what it means.
Just endless.
By the way, you know what the number one country on planet Earth right now in terms of per capita Omicron cases is?
Israel, where everyone is like boosted eight times.
In Israel, 80% of your body weight is now the vaccine.
Here's Joe Biden's CDC director trying to say that fully vaccinated is now boosted.
It doesn't matter if you, like me, had two doses plus Omicron, so I now have natural immunity.
None of that matters.
By the way, I think I had Omicron.
I didn't test positive for it, to be fair.
Although some of my family did.
Anyway, here we go.
Right now, we're pivoting our language.
We really want to make sure people are up-to-date.
That means if you recently got your second dose, you're not eligible for a booster, you're up-to-date.
If you are eligible for a booster and you haven't gotten it, you're not up-to-date and you need to get your booster in order to be up-to-date.
They're just crazy.
They're just crazy.
Meanwhile, they're doing nothing, by the way, to actually get the COVID pills that people need in place.
How is it that we've known for several months at this point that there are therapeutics available that lower the rate of hospitalization and death by like 90 to 100 percent?
This would be Pfizer's Paxlivid.
Why is it that we still have like 200,000 doses available for a country of 330 million?
This is nuts.
Again, the failures on the governmental level are astonishing and continuing, but we are supposed to believe them, even though everyone has basically gone back to normal in their daily lives in the same areas of the country.
So again, the left should—they can get as pissed at Barry Weiss and Bill Maher as they want, but the reality is that Barry and Bill have it right, because we had it right before Barry and Bill did.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Moore Show, that is available right now.
Now I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Editing is by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Koromina, hair and makeup is by Fabiola Cristina, production assistant Jessica Crand.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2022.
A Democrat politician pulls his own bill to help pregnant women after accidentally admitting that pro-lifers are right.
The CDC changes the meaning of fully vaccinated.
And a government meeting in Alaska begins with an invocation by a Satanist.
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