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Jan. 27, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:15
Justice Breyer Gets Out While The Getting’s Good | Ep. 1421
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Time Text
Justice Stephen Breyer heads for the exits before the midterm elections.
Joe Biden considers which black woman to pick.
And the Federal Reserve announces it will raise interest rates soon.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so yesterday, Justice Stephen Breyer announced that he would be leaving the Supreme Court at the end of the current term, but he really didn't announce it.
It was just sort of announced for him, and apparently he was kind of ticked about all of this.
There were multiple reports yesterday that he had planned on announcing this, but it sort of leaked before he was ready for it, according to Shannon Bream.
According to Breitbart.com, many reports indicated that Breyer was surprised and caught off guard about the announcement.
Neither Breyer nor the Supreme Court has issued a public announcement about his supposed retirement.
The White House and President Biden have refused to comment on the news, which was first reported by CNBC.
Biden said there's been no announcement from Justice Breyer.
Let him make whatever statement he's going to make.
I'll be happy to talk about it later.
Upon rumors, Biden may nominate Vice President Kamala Harris to the Supreme Court.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said she would not comment on any potential nominees.
Here was Jen Psaki yesterday saying that she wouldn't answer if Kamala Harris might be continuing her giant ride upward based on failure.
I've never seen someone fail up as much as Kamala Harris.
And she's a failed Attorney General.
She failed upward into the Senate.
She failed upward from the Senate into the Vice Presidency.
And now there's talk she may fail upward from the Vice Presidency into the Supreme Court, just so they can get rid of her.
Like, she's so bad at VP.
When the Democrats cannot have her as the nominee, should Joe Biden go down, they're like, let's just stick that lady over at the Supreme Court.
She'll be a reliable vote for anything that we need.
And sure, she sucks at everything, but who cares about that?
Here was Jen Psaki refusing to answer the question yesterday.
When you were asked about the vice president possibly being selected as a Supreme Court nominee, you said you're not going to speak to any considerations.
Does that mean she is being considered?
Again, Peter, I'm not going to speak to the reports of a Supreme Court justice retirement that hasn't been announced.
So theoretically, would someone who's- Theoretically?
I do like that you preface it.
I appreciate that.
Just wondering, hypothetically, theoretically, would someone who was an attorney general of a large state and who served with many key Senate votes be an attractive candidate to the president for an open Supreme Court seat?
I see what you did there, Peter.
But the President has every intention, as he said before, of running for re-election, and for running for re-election with Vice President Harris on the ticket as his partner.
Okay, so, of course, that's probably right.
They're not going to nominate Kamala Harris.
There are a few complicating factors.
First of all, Kamala Harris is the tie-breaking vote.
She'd have to, presumably, resign from her seat as Vice President of the United States in order to be considered for the Supreme Court.
He'd have to select a new Vice President, and at that point, that person would be the tie-breaker because she'd have to not vote on her own nomination.
So, that's really kind of ridiculous and insane.
So, Kamala Harris is not going to be the nominee.
It is hilarious that the left was so nervous about the 2022 elections that they basically just bodily threw Stephen Breyer off the Supreme Court.
So you remember that Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the notorious RBG, heroine to the masses, the person that the left worshipped.
I mean, they made documentaries about her and they had votive candles of her, and she was the most important justice on the Supreme Court, despite the fact that she really wasn't all that important a justice in the grand scheme of things.
There were very few Extraordinarily important decisions over her tenure at the Supreme Court.
She was just a reliable vote for the left.
Just as Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the crucial error of thinking that Hillary Clinton was going to win the 2016 election, and so she didn't step down despite some pressure to do so.
And then Donald Trump won, and then Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat was filled by Donald Trump.
Which meant that the court shifted from basically even to now a 6-3 Supreme Court, because Donald Trump got three picks while he was President of the United States, and at least two of them were swings, right?
One was a Ginsburg seat, and one was the seat for Justice Kennedy.
So you'll remember that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020 while Trump was president.
She thought Hillary was going to be president, and Hillary wasn't.
So that meant that Trump got to replace her.
Democrats want to avoid that this time.
Democrats also want to avoid the situation they had when Justice Scalia died, because Justice Scalia died while there was a Democratic president, but there was a Republican Senate.
And what they were afraid of here is that Breyer would pass away or would leave while the Republicans controlled the Senate, and Republicans could just prevent a Democratic pick from taking the seat.
So they basically just announced it for him.
He's sitting over there in the corner.
He's like, yeah, I'll probably, you know, go whenever.
And they're like, you shut your face.
You're leaving now, which is why he's kind of pissed off.
According to NBC News, President Biden and Breyer are scheduled to appear together at the White House on Thursday as the Supreme Court justice is set to announce his retirement.
Breyer is one of the three remaining liberal justices.
His decision to retire after more than 27 years on the court.
Allows Biden to appoint a successor who could serve for decades and in the short term maintain the current 6-3 split between conservative and liberal justices.
Now, again, this is not a swing seat.
Breyer's seat being filled by somebody on the left would just be a left seat being filled by somebody on the left.
At 83, Breyer is the court's oldest member.
Liberal activists have urged him for months to retire, while Democrats hold both the White House and the Senate.
And he's been pretty annoyed by the pressure that he's been getting from the outside.
Apparently that pressure has been mounting over the course of months.
There's an article from September 2021 from a site called ballsandstrikes.org called Bullying Stephen Breyer is good, actually.
We need to throw this old man out of here.
Get him the hell out of here before Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump becomes president.
And at that point, it's going to be very, very difficult for us to replace a liberal with another liberal.
That's all they care about.
Now, who is Joe Biden going to replace Stephen Breyer with?
Well, we know the answer to this one because Joe Biden said it back during the campaign.
During the campaign, Joe Biden kept pledging that every Open position was going to violate federal civil rights law.
He was just going to select a black woman for everything, for his vice president, for the Supreme Court justice, for dog catcher, did not matter.
It was going to be a black woman no matter what.
Here was Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign saying that he would pick a black woman to fill the Supreme Court seat.
Because again, by the way, this violates federal civil rights law.
There's no other area of American life where you could say I want a white male for X seat.
You couldn't say it.
It's literally a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution of the United States.
You're not saying, as one factor among many, I want a woman who has the experience of a black woman, right?
First of all, that's a ridiculous assertion on its face, because not all black women have the same experiences, but put that aside.
Even if you use the multifactorial analysis that the Supreme Court has been fond of with regard to affirmative action programs at universities, as we talked about the other day on the show, Even if you threw that aside, Biden didn't even say that.
He just said, I want a black woman.
Okay, there is no other area of American legal jurisprudence where you could say, I want a person of this specific race and this specific sex to fill this particular role and that not be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
Here was Joe Biden pledging to do it back in 2020.
I committed that if I'm elected president and have an opportunity to appoint someone to the courts, I'll appoint the first black woman to the courts.
It's required that they have representation now.
It's long overdue.
Okay, so that is an insane contention right off the top.
And the fact that we all sort of accept this as rote is wild.
That presidents of the United States can now just say things like that.
That they can just go out there and be like, I want a person of this particular race and this particular sex, and it doesn't matter anything else.
But this is the way that the left views the court, by the way.
The left views the court as two things.
One, a place to put people of particular races and particular sexes.
And two, that person has to reliably vote for the left.
Hey, this has nothing to do with qualifications.
Now, some of the people who are being considered for the seat have the usual qualifications for a Supreme Court justice, namely an Ivy League school and a clerkship, maybe a few years as a judge.
That sort of stuff is sort of de rigueur for the seat.
But Democrats don't care about that.
What they really care about is we must have black women.
And not only must she be a black woman, she must vote reliably for the left.
See, here's the thing.
Democrats never miss on their picks.
They never, ever miss on their picks.
Ever.
And the reason Democrats never miss on their picks is because they just select people who are overt leftists.
The right plays this game.
It's this really stupid game, where in their hopes of getting somebody through the Senate confirmation process, they pick somebody who's sort of a cipher.
And they pick John Roberts, who's been on the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals for a little while.
has never written a controversial decision, has never been at the eye of the hurricane, and so tends toward the pragmatist and the political, and they never just pick somebody who is overtly conservative, right?
You never see the conservative movement or the Federalist Society or the President of the United States selecting somebody who is the lawyer for the National Right to Life Fund.
They never do this.
Now, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the actual lawyer for the National Organization for Women.
Hey, Democrats do this, right?
Thurgood Marshall was the lawyer for the NAACP.
They will just go to an organization that is allied with them, and then they will say, who is your best lawyer?
And then they will pick that person, they will elevate them to the Supreme Court.
They don't make this mistake.
They find somebody who has been through the wars on behalf of the left, and then they select that person for the Supreme Court.
Or they just openly ask them things like, will you uphold Roe vs. Wade?
And that person will be like, sure.
You never hear the right ask somebody, will you overturn Roe vs. Wade?
Which should be a litmus test.
The left gets this right and the right gets this wrong.
The left selects justices based on what they will do.
The right should select justices based on what they will do, not on the basis of political persuasion per se, but based on the reality that the Supreme Court has been a political body and has made political decisions that are wildly unconstitutional.
It seems to me a legal litmus test whether a justice will vote to overturn Roe.
If you will not vote to overturn Roe, you should not be sitting on the Supreme Court, certainly not as appointed by a Republican president of the United States.
Roe v. Wade is wildly unconstitutional.
It's insane.
Roe v. Wade is a ridiculous decision on its face.
And any justice who sort of is unwilling to say that openly should not be nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by Republicans.
The Republicans are always going for consensus.
They're always looking for, we need 60 votes, we need 70 votes.
Who cares?
Who cares?
First of all, Democrats don't give you the authority to do that anyway.
Democrats will never, ever again allow a Republican president to select a justice and that justice gets through with 70 votes.
It's not going to happen anymore.
Every single Republican appointee is going to be selected with all Republican votes and maybe one or two Democratic votes.
That's it.
So this ridiculous notion by Republicans that when they select somebody for the Supreme Court, they have to pick somebody who has wide support.
It's ridiculous.
Democrats don't make the same mistake.
Democrats just assume that Republicans will admit their people to the Supreme Court so long as Democrats have the majority in the Senate.
Many of them will just vote for it, and they'll go along to get along.
And then they select people who are overtly left-wing.
Democrats, when Joe Biden says he wants a black woman for the Supreme Court, it does not matter to Democrats whether that black woman is Keitanji Brown-Jackson or whether it is Cardi B. It does not make any difference.
One of those people has the normal resume qualifications.
One of those people absolutely does not, but it does not matter.
So long as Cardi V voted the right way, first of all, they would say that Cardi B is a genius, right?
They would say that if you had questions about her qualifications, this made you a racist because this is the game the left loves to play.
But in reality, they don't care.
So long as they get their results oriented to jurisprudence, they're done.
They're finished.
Now, here's the difference between what the right would do on this and what the left would do.
You could ask a potential right-wing justice, like a Clarence Thomas type, you could ask, should Roe v. Wade be overturned?
And they say yes.
And then you say, well, what should we do with regard to, for example, The Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its violation of freedom of association.
And you might get a bunch of different answers because there are a bunch of different answers on the right to these questions.
There is no variation on the left.
There is lockstep adherence to basic rules of interpretation on the left.
And those rules of interpretation are what would a normal elected Democrat do?
We will do that thing.
There is no differentiation on the left between what the Supreme Court does and what a legislature does.
No differentiation whatsoever.
Where the left sits, all they care about is that a Supreme Court justice does what they want that justice to do.
It does not matter whether that justice is being asked to wildly exceed their own authority.
So that is why Joe Biden can say things like, I want a black lady.
That's why they can say that, because what they really mean is, and we all know this, they don't mean, I am looking for a person with the black female experience, or a black female to rectify discrimination in the past.
They mean, we want somebody who fulfills all of our political priors and happens to please a particular political constituency.
So they can overtly discriminate against people, which is really an amazing shift.
By the way, it's an amazing tonal shift in American politics.
You wouldn't have heard Bill Clinton doing this in the 90s.
You just wouldn't have.
And here's the more amazing thing.
If Joe Biden wanted to select a black woman, he doesn't even have to say it.
He didn't have to say it in 2020.
He could have just selected a black woman.
He would have gotten the same credit.
But here's the thing.
If you're a politician like Joe Biden, you know that in order to please political constituencies, you have to overtly pledge to be a racist in advance.
You have to say in advance, I will select a black woman so that black people supposedly, this is the way the left thinks about black voters.
That they can be bought with something like that.
And if you say that, then you'll win their vote.
And then you have to hold to the pledge.
And this is how Kamala Harris ends up as Vice President of the United States, despite being just a gas bag of terribleness.
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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Okay, so With all of this said, the people that Joe Biden is considering, he has a few people on the table, and some of them, as I say, are just overtly left-wing picks.
The most likely person is this woman named Katonji Brown-Jackson, who is 51 years old, so she'll be on the court for the next 40 years.
She has Ivy League credentials.
She went to Harvard Law.
She went to the Harvard Law Review.
She's an editor there.
She clerked for three federal judges, including Justice Breyer himself, from 1999 to 2000.
If nominated and confirmed, according to the Washington Post, Jackson will follow the same track as Brett Kavanaugh, who also clerked for the justice he ultimately replaced.
And also, Jackson is coming directly from the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals, which is typically seen as the sort of feeder circuit for the Supreme Court of the United States, right?
The D.C.
Circuit is where you get appointed before they put you into the Supreme Court of the United States.
The other picks that are being considered, one of them is Cheryl Ifill, who is the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Again, this is something Democrats will do.
Democrats will actively go to constituent groups, and then they will be like, who's your best lawyer?
Let's just put that person on the court.
Imagine if a conservative president Went to Cato Institute and was like, we need Ilya Shapiro, just get it.
Or imagine if they just went to Daily Wire and they were like, we need Ben, right?
Like, this would never happen on the right because the right doesn't have the stones for this.
But the left absolutely has the stones for this because for the left, again, the Supreme Court is just another political branch so they can do whatever the hell they want.
That is all they care about.
Getting what they want is all they care about.
Again, this is why Republicans miss 50% of the time.
And so here's the thing.
If the left is going to treat the Supreme Court like a political body, The right should overtly treat the Supreme Court like the political body that it is.
That does not mean that they should treat it exactly the same way, because when I say that the Supreme Court should be treated like a political body, what I mean is that the left has decided rules of constitutional interpretation do not apply.
This means the right can no longer afford to play footsie in future judicial picks.
We cannot have picks like Justice Roberts.
We cannot have picks Like Brett Kavanaugh.
We cannot have picks who are ciphers.
Okay, you can't have picks not knowing which way they're going to go.
You have to have people who have gone through the wars, who have gone through the battles, and if you have to pass them through with 51 votes, you pass them through with 50 plus 1.
That's what Democrats are going to do right here.
Right now, the real reason, by the way, that Breyer stepped down is, of course, because Democrats are about to get their asses kicked in 2022.
Come November, it's not going to be a Democratic Senate anymore.
Just like Justice Scalia died and then Merrick Garland was nominated by Barack Obama to fill his seat, but Mitch McConnell held up the seat, they're afraid the same thing could happen here with Stephen Breyer.
So that's why Breyer is stepping down before November.
What people really should read this as is not any sort of shock.
Or any sort of surprise, because it's not.
They should read it as, Stephen Breyer isn't an idiot, and so Stephen Breyer decided, I'm leaving before November.
Which underscores just how dumb Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not to step down while Barack Obama was president, waiting instead until the age of 87.
She died in 2020, and of course her seat was then filled by Donald Trump.
So right now, according to the New York Times, Democrats could confirm a successor to Justice Stephen Breyer without any Republican support under Senate rules that shields a Supreme Court nomination from a filibuster, but would have to hold their bare majority together to do so.
So basically they have to rely on Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin in order to ram this through.
I can't imagine that Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin won't go along with the Democrats on this one because Harry Reid broke this thing a long time ago.
Harry Reid broke the idea that you could filibuster a judicial nominee.
Years ago.
And that is what has created the current standard, which is that any sheer majority can just pass through whomever they want, right?
Mitch McConnell then used that in order to ram through a bunch of Trump's judicial nominees.
According to the New York Times, the announcement of Justice Breyer's imminent retirement on Wednesday set off a sprint by top Democrats to prepare for a coming confirmation fight over Biden's nominee to succeed him.
It also prompted a collective sigh of relief from the party and its progressive allies, who had worried that a Senate takeover by Republicans in the coming midterm elections could block the president from filling any vacancies.
Senator Chuck Schumer, of course, said that Biden's nominee will receive a prompt hearing in Senate Judiciary Committee and will be considered and confirmed by the full U.S.
Senate with all deliberate speed.
Now, you will recall the Democrats made precisely the opposite point in 2020, right?
In 2020, they said, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, how dare Republicans speed through a nomination?
We must wait for an election.
There must be an election.
We have to have a new president before the RBG seat is filled.
Mitch McConnell's like, well, I still got time on the calendar, so we're going for this thing.
Same thing right here.
So Democrats, if you held any consistent standard, which of course you don't, you would wait until the midterms.
I'm not expecting you to wait until the midterms, because I think McConnell did the right thing.
When you have the majority, you ram it through.
Democrats have the power to ram it through.
They will ram it through.
Okay, but just pointing out the wild inconsistency from the left right here, because the left's inconsistency here is truly amazing, right?
Just a few months ago.
This is not that long ago.
End of 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies.
We have about eight weeks until the election.
And Democrats say we must wait until the election so that people can speak on who they want to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat.
And McConnell's like, nope, we're doing it.
And well now, Democrats, shoes on the other foot, Democrats are doing the same thing.
Because as always, when it comes to politics, for Democrats, it's just a power game.
There is no principle whatsoever.
Like, none.
Democrats quickly called on Biden to follow through on his promise to nominate the first black woman to the court.
Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the number three Democrat said, I trust President Biden to move forward an exceptional nominee who will uphold all Americans' rights and liberties, including protecting voting rights and reproductive rights.
See, they don't even bother with the legal jargon here.
They're just like, yeah, we need abortion and we want the Voting Rights Act back in place.
So whoever you can nominate to do those things would be great.
I'm ready to move as quickly as possible, she says, to consider and confirm a highly qualified nominee who will break barriers and make history as the first black woman on the Supreme Court.
Like overt racism.
Overt racism is totally fine, according to the left.
And that really is the astonishing thing.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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I'd be remiss if I did not play some of the media reactions here.
Of course, the media reactions are all about, we need a black lady!
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So I'd be remiss if I did not play some of the media reactions here.
Of course, the media reactions are all about, we need a black lady.
That's what we need.
Now I noticed they're not talking about any of the conservative black women that are out Those names will never come up.
But what they really mean is we need a person who checks all of our political boxes and also is a black person who is female.
So therefore, you have, for example, CNN's Laura Coates, who says, I'd be overjoyed to have somebody who looks like me on the court.
She doesn't really mean that.
What she really means is I'd be overjoyed to see somebody who looks like me and thinks like me on the court, right?
Because it's not sufficient to look like you.
First of all, I think it's an absurdity that we even talk like this generally in American politics.
It's never occurred to me that I need somebody who looks like me on the court.
I need somebody with a yarmulke on the court.
Why would I care if there's somebody with a yarmulke on the court?
I'm perfectly happy with somebody who does the job.
Not according to the left, however, because they have ditched Martin Luther King long ago for early Malcolm X, and here's Laura Coates.
I would be overjoyed and thrilled to know that somebody who looks like me and has the mental prowess that each of these women have, and the credibility, the capability, the distinction of having served as judges and as extraordinary lawyers over their time, would finally, and I emphasize the word finally, finally be given the opportunity to sit on the highest court in the land.
Well, I mean, that's the important thing, is that you have somebody who looks like you.
What are we, children here?
A nation of children.
Everybody has to look like you in order for them to be considered a good Supreme Court pick.
My favorite is how we have now decided to group together all of the other justices, right?
Ideological diversity matters not for these people.
So Earl Warren is the exact same thing as Byron White, who's the exact same thing as Justice Scalia, according to the left.
They're all white men, right?
Eli Mistall over at MSNBC, he's like 108 of the 115 justices have been white men.
Yes, and they had a wide variety of dispositions towards the law, as you may have noticed.
I really care what goes on more in the gray matter than in the melanin level of the skin.
Also, I do like how you lump together all of the Jewish justices who were considered minority justices when they were appointed at the Louis Brandeis of the world.
But none of that matters, according to the left.
Okay, meanwhile, bad news for the Biden administration, because there's no good news on the economic front for the Biden administration.
The Fed has signaled that it is about to wildly increase the interest rates over the course of the year.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve signaled it would begin steadily raising interest rates in mid-March, its latest step toward removing stimulus to bring down inflation.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said on Wednesday the central bank was ready to raise rates at its March 15th to 16th meeting and could continue to lift them faster than it did during the past decade.
He said in a news conference, quote, this is going to be a year in which we move steadily away from the very highly accommodative monetary policy we put in place to deal with the economic effect of the pandemic.
Here was Jerome Powell announcing all of this yesterday.
Supply and demand imbalances related to the pandemic and the reopening of the economy have continued to contribute to elevated levels of inflation.
In particular, bottlenecks and supply constraints are limiting how quickly production can respond to higher demand in the near term.
These problems have been larger and longer lasting than anticipated, exacerbated by waves of the virus.
Well, that means that they're about to radically ramp up the tapering and they're about to radically ramp down the inflation.
Well, what that means for Joe Biden is probably a slight spike in unemployment.
It also means less investment just because there's less cash floating around.
So you're going to see some stock market dips.
That's exactly what happened immediately.
Stocks sold off while Jerome Powell was speaking, reversing big gains from earlier in the day.
By the way, You know, there are certain areas of American life, to many areas of American life, where we are just too reliant on quote-unquote experts, administrative experts, to run things.
And when it comes to our daily lives, we are now reliant on nine justices in Supreme Court robes, right?
People in black robes telling us what to do.
So we have to determine whether we get to keep employing our employees based on whether Justice Stephen Breyer has a ballot movement that day, right?
That is not good stuff.
We should not be relying on the Supreme Court of the United States to determine our liberties and our freedoms.
And the founders actually never conceived of that sort of thing, that the Supreme Court was going to be the ultimate guardian of all freedoms and that everybody else would abdicate their responsibility on this level.
So you'd have unelected Justice is determining our freedoms.
And then the administrative state does the same thing, right?
We have entire administrative bureaucracies that are specifically designed to control all aspects of your life.
Thousands of pages of regulations every single year.
Tens of thousands of pages written by faceless, nameless bureaucrats with essentially lifetime appointments who it's nearly impossible to fire.
And then you have the Federal Reserve, and we all react in the stock market based on what Jerome Powell decides to do today, whether his finger is in the wind that day.
This is not how economies should work.
This is why the idea of a gold standard was a good thing, because it took out of the control of the federal government the monetary supply.
We should not have the government determining whether we have inflation or not.
We should not have the government determining Whether the taxpayer is going to be buying assets from the market at large.
This sort of thing is absurd on its face.
The fact that this is how the stock market reacts.
You sit around waiting for Jerome Powell to make an announcement and then you trade stocks based on it.
It's really unpleasant.
When I say unpleasant, I mean that it is corrupt.
It is corrupting.
It is ugly.
It is not relying on the diffuse knowledge of the market.
It is relying on centralized bureaucrats to figure out what is best for you.
It is the death panels of American politics.
And these exist all over the place.
It is faceless, nameless bureaucrats you've never heard of who are determining every aspect of your life, from the financial, to your rights, to how you get to flush your toilet.
And it's really bad.
And Jerome Powell is one of those people.
The Federal Reserve was never meant to have this sort of power.
The Federal Reserve was meant to be a backstop in case of runs on banks.
It was not meant to be able to control unemployment and inflationary policy as a general rule.
This has become what the Federal Reserve does, right?
It's supposed to control unemployment.
That in and of itself is crazy.
Whenever you have a centralized bureaucracy that is attempting to control unemployment, why?
That is not how the economy is supposed to work.
And what it really is is a mask for failures of the underlying economy.
There's a case that David Bonson has been making, the investment guru.
What he's been saying is, we're all worried about inflation out here, and we should be, because inflation is a bad thing.
But, inflation is not the chief threat to the American economy.
The chief threat to the American economy is lack of real growth.
Lack of real innovation.
Regulatory disincentives, tax disincentives, the Federal Reserve deciding whether or not people invest in your business based on how much money they blow into the economy or take out of the economy.
These headwinds are faced by actual business people every single day.
When the government gets control of every aspect of the economy this way, then what you are left with Is a bunch of people attempting to read tea leaves and then trade your stocks based on them.
The stocks sold off while Jerome Powell was speaking, reversing big gains from earlier in the day.
The S&P 500 closed down 0.1%.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished down 0.4%.
The Nasdaq inched up slightly.
Yields on 10-year Treasury securities climbed as investors anticipated a more aggressive path of rate rises.
Powell left open the door to raising interest rates at consecutive policy meetings, which are held roughly every six weeks.
The Fed hasn't done that since 2006.
He said, I don't think it's possible to say exactly how this is going to go.
I think there's quite a bit of room to raise interest rates without threatening the labor market.
Pell's remarks led investors in interest rate futures markets to fully anticipate a March rate increase of at least one quarter percentage point and nearly 70% chance of a second rate increase by the Fed's meeting after that in early May.
Pell suggested the Fed wasn't likely to offer any forward guidance, the term used for the central bank's statements describing its intentions with interest rates over the next few years.
Forward guidance has been a central feature of Fed policy.
So now they're not even going to give you any sort of guideposts for the next several years.
So if you're an investor, one of the things that you search for is a solid investment that is going to give you return for the next several years.
And in order to know that, you have to know what the Fed is going to do.
Now the Fed is like, well, we could change on a dime.
Right?
We could be fast moving.
Boom!
Fast actin' tinactin' of the financial markets.
Well, that is not a good thing.
There's an author named George Gilder who writes on economics all the time.
He has described the idea of what he calls information theory.
The basic idea is this.
When you are investing, You should think of investing as adding new information to a phone line.
If there's a lot of static on the phone line, the new information may not get through.
So the goal of the financial regulators should be to have a static-free phone line.
In other words, the conditions don't change on the ground very fast, you have a lot of notice if the conditions are going to change, and that way you don't have a lot of sort of garbled interference from the top levels.
And yet now the Federal Reserve is overtly announcing there's going to be a lot of garbled nonsense from the top levels.
You're going to get staticky interference on that line.
On a regular basis now.
In 2015, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Fed prepared markets for a mild path of no more than one rate rise every quarter by saying increases would be only gradual.
Pressed twice Wednesday on whether the Fed would follow that approach, Powell pointed to how the economy is much different now with high inflation and very tight labor markets.
The takeaway, said Christina Hooper, chief global market strategist at Invesco, is that this is not the last tightening cycle.
We need to be prepared for it to be faster and for more substantial moves to be made over the course of the year.
Relying less on forward guidance means that you risk unhinging market expectations about interest rates.
Said Vincent Reinhart, former Fed economist, who is now the chief economist at Mellon.
So what this means is that you can't rely on what the Fed is going to do next, which means uncertainty, which means people take money out of the market.
When people are scared, they take money out of the market, they start investing in things like bonds.
They don't invest as much in stocks.
They don't invest as much in mortgages.
They just don't invest in as many things.
You're about to see a tightening because of the Fed getting involved this way.
And that was brought about by the insane spending bidge embarked upon by both parties, but especially the Democratic Party over the course of the last year and then over the course of the last two years.
During the pandemic, there was this idea that we could pay people to stay home.
That might have been a decent idea in the first couple of months.
Beyond that, once we knew the data, it made no sense whatsoever.
We kept doing it.
We blew trillions and trillions of dollars into the economy.
There are people who ended last year with more assets than they had at the beginning of the pandemic, and they hadn't been back to work.
Because we blew so much money into the economy, and now the Fed is forced to tighten interest rates and do so unpredictably.
Meanwhile, the Fed released a separate one-page statement that spelled out high-level principles to guide a process for significantly reducing its holdings.
The central bank in 2020 cut short-term interest rates to near zero and started buying bonds to lower long-term rates as the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S.
economy, triggering financial market volatility and a deep, short recession.
Officials pledged to hold interest rates near zero until inflation was forecast to moderately exceed two percent.
Pell indicated that he and his colleagues believe those goals have now been met.
And so now they have to divest themselves of the, I believe, something like nine trillion dollars in assets that are being held by the Fed.
It's something insane.
Okay, all of this is bad news for the immediate future of the economy, but it's pain that has to be gone through because once you go on a spending bid, you wake up the next morning with a hangover.
And that's really where we are at this point.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the continuing panic over COVID that is completely unjustified by the available data.
First, Let's talk about keeping your home safe.
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Ladies and gentlemen, comedian, actor and friend, T.J.
in just one moment.
First, the latest episode of the Adam Carolla's comedy series, Truth Yeller is streaming right now.
Adam is joined by Silicon Valley and Deadpool actor, TJ Miller.
TJ has some thoughts about basic health considerations in a post COVID world.
Check it out.
Ladies and gentlemen, comedian, actor, and friend, TJ Miller.
Oh my gosh, hello.
Sorry, I was just jogging.
I was trying to find my dog.
But I double-fisted it because, you know, it evens out as you jog the weight.
This guy looked at me and he goes, it's true, it is true.
I'm joking, but you're serious.
This guy really does do it.
Hi, thank you for having me.
Thanks for coming out.
Oh, I'm excited.
This is just a prop, though.
Do you want this?
Oh, you won't take it, huh?
Why, COVID?
You one of those guys, huh?
Won't drink a stranger's beer because of COVID.
So head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe use code Miller for 25% off your membership right now.
Look out for the new episode with TJ Miller right this moment.
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♪♪ Meanwhile, while the Fed is basically treating the pandemic as over.
I mean, that's really what's happening here.
The Fed is saying the pandemic is over.
We need to stop with all of this nonsense.
The federal government refuses to do that.
So you still have Anthony Fauci dodging on what it would look like for the pandemic to be over.
Because, again, you're bureaucrats.
Bureaucrats rely on uncertainty.
Because then they get to provide the certainty in a world of uncertainty that they have helped create.
So they refuse to tell you you can live a free life.
They will be dictating to you whether you will be free or not free.
And they will never offer you any sort of timeline or actual metric to follow.
This happens, by the way, all the time on a personal level.
I mean, it's crazy.
I remember fairly recently, I was dealing with an organization where there were some COVID rules that were being applied at this organization.
And all we kept asking for is, when do the COVID rules change?
We need actual metrics, we need actual dates.
And they kept saying, we can't give that to you.
If we give that to you, you might hold us accountable for it.
That's Anthony Fauci.
Here is the second greatest of all doctors after Jill Biden explaining that there are really no metrics to determine when the pandemic is over.
Where we want to be, Okay, well that's not a metric.
I've noticed that you're not giving a metric.
like we did with smallpox, that's unreasonable.
Not necessarily elimination, like we've done with polio and with measles by mass vaccination campaigns, but a level of control that does not disrupt us in society.
Okay, well, that's not a metric.
I've noticed that you're not giving a metric.
By the way, Americans are picking up on this.
According to the Associated Press, early in the pandemic, Ryan Wilson was careful to take precautions, wearing a mask, not really socializing, doing more of his shopping online.
The 38-year-old father and seafood butcher from Castleberry, Florida, says he relaxed a bit after getting vaccinated last year.
He had a few friends over, saw his parents more, still making sure to mask up at places like the grocery store.
The recent virus surge hasn't caused him to change his behavior much because he's vaxxed and has read that the variant causes less severe illness.
And like many, Wilson has come to believe COVID-19 is probably never going fully away.
It'll become endemic and we'll be stuck with it forever.
It's frustrating, but what can you do about it?
Many Americans agree they're going to be stuck with it forever, at least for a long time.
A poll from the AP shows that few, just 15%, say they will consider the pandemic over only when COVID-19 is largely eliminated.
By contrast, 83% say they will feel the pandemic is over when it's largely a mild illness, which, by the way, is correct.
However, what is not correct is how many Americans believe that it's not a mild illness.
The poll shows 59% of Americans think it's essential they be personally vaccinated against COVID-19 to feel safe participating in public activities.
Okay, that is fair enough.
But underscoring what authorities call alarmingly low COVID-19 vaccination rates in the United States, children ages 5 to 11, just 37% of parents consider it essential that their kids are vaccinated before they return to normal, which of course is true.
Okay, and only 47% of Americans think they need to get a booster.
64% of Americans now say they are always or often avoiding large groups.
65% say they are wearing face masks around others.
Both are up from 57% in December.
So this is the part that's totally crazy.
The reason it's crazy is because our public health officials are saying stupid garbage over and over and over to scare people.
Meanwhile, Denmark's like, we're done.
According to Newsweek, Denmark Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced on January 26th that Denmark would be throwing out most COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, including mask mandates.
Restrictions currently in place are for the public to wear masks on public transportation, in restaurants, shops, and people entering healthcare facilities and retirement homes.
However, following the February 1st change of restrictions, masks will only be required in hospitals, healthcare facilities, and homes for the elderly.
Frederiksen said, we say goodbye to the restrictions and welcome the life we knew before.
As of February 1st, Denmark will be open.
According to the health minister, Magnus Heunicke, Denmark's recent cases of COVID were more than 46,000 daily on average.
However, only 40 people are in ICUs.
Heunicke says we can continue with strong epidemic surveillance and we can react quickly if necessary.
He said there could be a rise in infections and some people might need to get boosted.
But Denmark is done.
Denmark is done, and you're going to see more and more countries being done.
But the United States is going to be one of the last countries to be done.
See, one of the great myths about the United States is that the United States is highly freedom-oriented on issues like this.
No, half the United States is.
Half of the United States is more liberal than the most liberal states in Europe.
Half of the United States is to the left of Sweden and Denmark.
Like, well to the left of Sweden, and well, well to the left of Denmark as well.
All of this is based on bad data.
It is.
I mean, the reason it's based on bad data, by the way, is because, again, a huge number of Americans have natural immunity to this thing, and we've just ignored it all the way down.
Okay, final note.
I just have to comment on this because it's hilarious.
So Neil Young, who apparently is some sort of singer.
So he had said to Spotify that unless they got rid of Joe Rogan, they should lose his music, right?
His music should go away.
So Spotify was like, okay, bye.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, we want all the world's music and audio content to be available to Spotify users, said a spokesperson.
With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators.
We have detailed content policies in place.
We've removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID since the start of the pandemic.
We regret Neil Young's decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.
Young had said on January 24th, I'm doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines, potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation spread by them.
They can have Rogan or Young.
Not both.
Okay, well, basically, as soon as Neil Young said Spotify, you can have Young or... Everybody's like, okay, just... Bye.
Like, he could literally have picked any other name out of that.
You can have Young or Carrot Top, and Spotify's like, well, we will catch you later.
You and your dozen fans.
Enjoy.
I love that people keep running up against the iceberg that is Joe Rogan's show.
People on the left keep saying over and over that they want to get Rogan booted, and then it turns out that Rogan is making too much money for Spotify.
Again, the best revenge, folks, as always, is success.
No one cares about Neil Young, but Joe Rogan has 11 million listeners to his podcast every episode.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, Make sure to go check out the Michael Molls show that is available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Editing is by Adam Sajewicz.
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A liberal Supreme Court justice steps down.
The DHS secretary gets caught on tape admitting that the situation at the southern border is historically bad.
And Joe Rogan survives another attempt by the woke left to cancel him.
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