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Feb. 25, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:26
Biden's Giant Ukraine Failure Continues | Ep. 1441
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Joe Biden announces fresh sanctions.
He admits are unlikely to do anything.
John Kerry hopes Russia will just keep focusing on climate change.
And our celebrities have thoughts on Vladimir Putin's childhood.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, the situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Russian forces moved by air and land to attack Kiev on Friday, while the capital's defenders dug into positions along its forested edge and prepared to blow up the bridges.
At an airfield, Russian troops who had taken the facility following an airborne assault linked with Russian armored troops had poured in from Belarus, Ukrainian soldiers on the front line said.
With Ukrainian artillery and armor dispersed nearby, troops, including recently enrolled volunteers in civilian dress, raced for the Russian onslaught from the north and west after Kiev came under renewed bombardment earlier in the day and President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed not to surrender.
Defenders were gearing up for urban combat, gunfire erupted in several Kiev neighborhoods, and what Ukrainian officials said were clashes with Russian infiltrators.
Ukrainian artillery and tanks were moving through the city.
The Ukrainian Defense Ministry has been asking citizens of Ukraine to make Molotov cocktails on Twitter.
They've now been calling on Europeans with any military training to come and help them and pour into Ukraine in an attempt to repel the Russians.
Casualty figures were unclear.
Zelensky said on Friday that 137 people had already been killed.
Other officials put the toll in the hundreds as well.
Kiev was hit by a series of Russian airstrikes that shook the city center through the morning after Putin ordered an all-out assault on Ukraine aimed at toppling the government of Zelensky and ending Ukraine's alignment with the West altogether.
A residential high-rise went up in flames after being hit.
Russia has not gone in full-scale with troops at this point because they're attempting to establish air superiority before they allegedly attempt to bring in about 10,000 paratroopers.
Thousands of residents of Kiev spent the night in underground subway stations that had been converted into bomb shelters overnight.
Zelensky, wearing a military sweatshirt, said on Friday this morning, We are defending our country all alone.
The most powerful nations of the world are just watching from afar.
Only solidarity and decisiveness by Ukrainians will be able to preserve our freedom and our state.
He also added that he was Russia's principal target as Moscow seeks to bring down Ukraine's democratically elected government.
He said the enemy has marked me as enemy Number one, they want to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state.
And this, of course, aligns with a lot of what we're hearing from intelligence sources that say that the goal here is to decapitate the Zelensky administration and then put in place a Putin puppet regime in Ukraine, the same way that they have in places like Donetsk and Luhansk.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday Moscow recognizes Zelensky as Ukraine's president, but was yet to assess a suggestion from Kiev it might be willing to begin talks with Russia over Ukraine adopting neutral status as a country.
So that is one of the offers that Zelensky is now putting on the table.
He suggested that he would declare Ukraine to be non-aligned, saying, we will formally never attempt to join NATO, which is what Putin had originally said he wanted.
But now that the troops are on the ground, I think it's highly unlikely that Putin acquiesces to any of these calls for negotiation.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Zelensky of lying and said the Ukrainian president had missed his opportunity when Putin previously suggested a non-aligned status.
Lavrov is no longer interested in anything short of Zelensky's head on a platter, or at least seeing him locked up in a Moscow labor camp, according to Jazz Shaw, writing for Hot Air.
Putin has gone in too far at this point to simply pull out without any sort of change in the top level of the administration in Ukraine.
Zelensky said they wanted to destroy Ukraine politically by destroying the head of state.
He said his family was the number two target.
He said, my family is not traitors, but citizens of Ukraine.
I have no right to say where they are now.
He said that enemy sabotage groups had infiltrated the city, according to the Washington Post, and that NATO and Europe had left Ukraine alone to defend itself against the Russian onslaught.
The most dramatic footage of the day came from a place called Snake Island, which is just off the coast of Ukraine, of course.
And apparently, there was an audio exchange as Russian warships approached Snake Island, also known as Zmini Island.
A Russian officer says, this is a military warship.
This is a Russian military warship.
I suggest you lay down your weapons and surrender to avoid bloodshed and needless casualties.
Otherwise, you will be bombed.
And then a Ukrainian soldier comes on the air and says, Russian warship, go F yourself.
Apparently all of the soldiers, all the Ukrainian soldiers, were then summarily killed by the Russian forces that are invading.
Zelensky said, we will give weapons to anyone who wants to defend the country, be ready to support Ukraine in the squares of our city.
We will lift sanctions on all citizens of Ukraine who are ready to defend our country as part of territorial defense with weapons in hand.
Kiev, of course, has been hit over and over at this point.
Multiple explosions were heard earlier in the day, according to the Washington Post.
Sirens were heard in Lviv as well.
That's Ukraine's far west and near NATO's eastern flank.
A senior Ukrainian defense official said Russian forces were near the town of Borzal, some 20 miles to Kiev's northwest.
Biden administration officials told lawmakers late Thursday they feared the capital would soon fall with Russian mechanized forces that had crossed over from Belarus on its outskirts.
Ukrainian President Zelensky said Thursday he remained in Kiev, though enemy sabotage groups were already in the capital.
So, things are extraordinarily grim in Ukraine.
It looks as though Russia is just days, if not hours, from taking Kiev outright and then presumably killing all of its opponents or sending them to labor camps and putting in place a regime more friendly to its own ambitions.
One of the things that has happened here?
is that Vladimir Putin has shattered a couple of generations worth of really, really bad foreign policy thing.
It turns out that some of the dumbest people on earth are the people who make foreign policy for the State Department.
I'm talking in bipartisan fashion.
And this has been true for quite a while.
The State Department is filled with quizzling idiots.
And it's always been filled with quizzling idiots.
And it's not a shock to learn that the State Department really doesn't know what it's doing very often.
Remember that during the Trump administration in the Middle East, the State Department kept suggesting that if, for example, the U.S.
Embassy in Israel was moved to Jerusalem, that would spark all-out war in the Middle East and that peace could never be achieved.
John Kerry, former Secretary of State, said that peace could never be achieved with Arab nations without some sort of concessions to the Palestinians.
Of course, that was the groupthink at the State Department talking, and it was completely wrong.
And there are a number of premises that have been held by idiots at the State Department, or elites at the State Department, that are just incredibly wrong, and Putin proved a bunch of them wrong over the course of the last week.
Number one, the idea that economic sanctions deter major military powers from doing anything is wrong, and it has been wrong for a very, very long time.
In fact, there's a good new book out titled The Economic Weapon by a professor at Yale University, Nicholas Mulder.
And that book is about a history of economic warfare and the use of economic sanctions to try and deter major forces from engaging in warfare.
And of course, it has never worked.
We've tried economic sanctions against Japan.
It didn't work.
We tried economic sanctions against Italy when they invaded Ethiopia.
It didn't work.
We tried economic sanctions against Hitler.
It did not work.
Over and over again, we have tried economic sanctions on major powers.
And the real fact of the matter is that economic sanctions on major powers are ineffective.
Because those major powers usually are able to avoid those economic sanctions by finding other people to ally with them or align with them.
If there are big financial or commercial loopholes, then it makes it nearly impossible for sanctions to have any long-term impact.
And again, alliances allow you to skirt all of that, which is exactly what Russia has known.
So economic sanctions were bound to be a failure here, particularly the sort of economic sanctions that we were laying for Russia, as we'll talk about in just one moment.
But that's not the only idiotic foreign policy idea that was shattered by Vladimir Putin's aggression.
Another idiotic foreign policy idea is that just because you're a second-rate economic power, that means that you are not going to be aggressive.
That's always been foolish.
In fact, it turns out that countries that are second-rate economic powers have routinely been extraordinarily aggressive on their borders.
The reason being, when you are weak internally, this means that you tend to be more aggressive externally in order to lock down your own population and give them some sort of common purpose.
So everyone was suggesting that because Russia has a very weak economy, again, Russia's total national GDP is approximately the size of the GDP of the state of Florida.
Just because of that, the idea was, well, Russia presumably would stop being quite as aggressive.
Why?
Why would we think that?
And yet that was the going wisdom in a lot of foreign policy circles.
Other going wisdom in foreign policy circles, promoted by the likes of always-wrong Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, is that if countries had McDonald's, they wouldn't fight each other.
That trade ties would somehow, this is the converse of the economic sanctions argument, that trade ties would somehow prevent war from breaking out.
That wasn't even true with World War I. The late 19th century, early 20th century was considered a period, a high watermark of global economic integration.
And it ended in disaster with World War I.
So it's always foolish the notion that if you have countries that have allowed some semblance of capitalism to invade, that this would somehow bring countries closer together.
Not necessarily.
Other myths.
That the UN is a useful institution.
Now, everybody has known for decades that the UN is a completely useless institution.
It was formed in the aftermath of World War II.
There are countries that are on the Security Council that just should not be on the Security Council.
The fact that the United States and the USSR were both on the Security Council immediately meant that the UN was going to be a useless and feckless organization.
Today, you have Russia and China sitting on the Security Council.
That means nothing is ever going to get done there.
The idea of having a league of nations with nations that despise you and want to destroy you is completely stupid.
The UN is not just stupid, it is counterproductive.
It has been corrupt and venal, and the General Assembly has been largely evil for nearly all of its entire existence.
So when you see our politicians jet-setting over to the UN in order to inform the nations of the world in highfalutin, high-blown speech that history will rebuke people like Vladimir Putin, yeah, the UN is a useless organization, we should level the building and salt the ground.
Other ideas on foreign policy that have been proved wrong by Vladimir Putin here.
And again, this doesn't mean that Vladimir Putin is right or good.
Vladimir Putin is a thug dictator.
He's been a thug dictator for a very, very long time.
He is right now, I believe, the longest-serving world leader on planet Earth.
But other ideas that he has shattered here, because it turns out that a hard-headed, brute military force shatters a lot of illusions, are that non-treaty promises by major nations are useful and trustworthy.
They are not.
Ukraine was promised security by the West.
Nope.
Hong Kong was promised security by the West.
Nope.
So if you're Taiwan, why would you believe any non-treaty promises by the West?
Wouldn't you immediately be seeking to proliferate nuclear weapons?
If you are a non-aligned country, or if you're a country that just does not have formal treaty obligations from the West, why would you not seek your own nuclear deterrent right now and build up your military right now?
We're about to watch a nuclear arms race like we frankly have not seen in world history.
Because if you are a nation that is threatened by China or threatened by Russia, are you going to trust that the same West that turned over Hong Kong to the Chinese and turned over Afghanistan to the Taliban and turned over Ukraine to the Russians and watches as they fight alone, are you going to trust them?
Again, that's not an argument for us intervening to put troops in Ukraine.
It's an argument for why Ukraine never should have given up its nuclear weapons and why if the West truly wanted to integrate Ukraine, it should have actually made treaty obligations to Ukraine because that would have prevented Vladimir Putin from coming face to face with Kiev.
Finally, the notion that international law exists at all has been disproved by Vladimir Putin, who has proved once again that international law, in the words of novelist Leon Uris, international law is something invoked by the evil to the detriment of the good.
It's generally used by people who are bad in order to stop good people from fighting back.
When good people invoke international law, the bad people don't give any craps at all.
And that is the story of Vladimir Putin.
So all of those ideas have now been shattered.
And yet we live in a world of illusion.
And that world of illusion, pretty words, Spoken badly by the President of the United States, make all of this go away.
If we just say pretty things, if we Barack Obama this thing, then maybe the world will become a better place.
And the hard power that Russia is now using to great effect in Ukraine, to shell-shock all of the NATO nations on its borders, and to take over a fully-fledged democracy in Ukraine that is basically on the border being a first world country.
The takeover of Ukraine, which is a war at the heart of Eastern Europe, That should have disillusioned a lot of these people, but it's not going to.
It's not going to.
Because again, the experts remain the experts.
As we've learned over the last couple of years, being wrong doesn't make you not an expert.
It means that the public just doesn't understand you properly.
In a second, we'll get to Joe Biden's pathetic speech yesterday, and it really was pathetic.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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So we had the spectacle of Joe Biden wandering out or being directed out toward a podium yesterday.
Again, late to his own press conference because this is what he does.
And he wandered out late to the podium where he proceeded to explain that history would be the final rebuke for Vladimir Putin.
So while he's talking about how history would be the final rebuke for Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Putin is like, yeah, I'm over here taking Kiev.
So you talk all you want about history.
Meanwhile, you know, I'm I'm just going to go do what I what I please.
It turns out that history is not an actual force in the world.
History is just you writing stuff about stuff that happened in the past.
It is fairly incredible.
I will say the substitution of the word history for God in this formulation has significantly less impact.
Here is Joe Biden citing how history is going to view Vladimir Putin.
Putin's choice to make a totally unjustifiable war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger.
Liberty, democracy, human dignity, these are the forces far more powerful than fear and oppression.
They cannot be extinguished by tyrants like Putin and his armies.
They cannot be erased from people's hearts and hopes by any amount of violence and intimidation.
They endure.
Okay, that is a load of bloviating bull crap right there.
That is a load of bloviating bull crap.
So his argument is that Russia will be weaker and the rest of the world stronger after Vladimir Putin takes Ukraine with no serious Western response.
He's gonna have to explain the math on that one.
Also, when he says things like liberty cannot be extinguished, yeah, it absolutely can.
There might be the liberty beating in the breast of every human heart, the desire for it, but those require institutions.
Those require governments that actually guarantee liberty.
It turns out that the vast majority of human history, liberty has not been the way that people live, particularly in this area of the world.
I mean, we just got done with a 20th century where nearly the entirety of Eastern Europe was dominated by a fascist communist force.
And we are supposed to believe that liberty is inevitably, well, not for these people, it's not.
These people are now subjected to absolute tyranny.
Did the liberty beating in the heart of Afghan citizens save them from the predations of the Taliban?
Did the liberty beating in the heart of people living in Hong Kong save them from the predations of the Chinese?
What the hell is he talking about?
Pretty words are no substitute for actual real politique.
Pretty words are not a substitute for an effective approach to a dictator with aggressive intent and a real willingness to take risks on behalf of reestablishment of a Peter the Great Russian Empire.
It's absurd to watch this old man doddering around talking about how liberty is inevitably going to win.
Really, is it inevitably going to win?
Because I've noticed that there's nothing inevitable about history.
That's one of the things that I've noticed.
A lot of people die on the way to liberty, as it turns out.
And a lot of people who are living in liberty end up back in tyranny.
If people do nothing.
And if you make stupid plans.
And if you disarm nations in the face of Russian aggression with the promise that sometime in the future you might help them out.
Those sort of empty words, not only do they mean nothing, they are insulting.
They're insulting in the face of what people in Ukraine are currently experiencing.
If you're living in Ukraine, again, an incipient democracy, and you're living in relative levels of freedom, and here come the Russian troops down the street, and you hear the President of the United States, who, as we will discuss, is about to posit a series of feckless actions that will accomplish virtually nothing, saying, don't worry, liberty is going to win.
All that does is make a mockery of liberty.
The reality throughout human history is that if you are going to have liberty prevail, that requires actual hard-headed decision-making in pursuit of that liberty.
Not a bunch of gussied-up words written by a bad two-years-out-of-law-school speechwriter from Wellesley.
It's ridiculous.
The president makes a mockery of his own office when he does this sort of stuff.
And this has been true, by the way, pretty much forever.
Whenever a president goes out there and he launches this kind of rhetoric, history will judge.
If you want to do this in a religious sense, God will judge.
Yeah, after death, God may judge.
But if you are going to suggest that history will judge, history is not a disembodied thing.
Right now, Vladimir Putin has written the history of Russia.
Joe Biden isn't writing the history of Russia.
And so all of this would be less grating if Joe Biden actually had any sort of wherewithal to put together a plan.
But he has no plan.
His plan is to call on Americans to make sacrifices that he openly admits will not achieve their intended effect.
That's the part of this that's amazing.
I'm perfectly willing to go along with Joe Biden if Joe Biden says, listen, here's the deal.
We're going to go after the natural gas and oil sectors of the Russian economy.
We're going to relieve all of the regulations on the American oil-producing part of the economy.
We're going to go back to opening up federal lands.
We're going to reopen Keystone XL because this is war.
And we are going to have to tell the Greens that they need to take a backseat for the moment while we deal with Russia.
And you might have to pay a temporarily higher price at the pump in order for us to do that.
That is a case worth making.
He's not making that case.
He is saying that you should pay a higher price at the pump today so that he can pursue a bunch of actions that he himself openly admits will accomplish nothing like what he says he wants to accomplish.
That's unthinkably bad politics.
It's stupid on behalf of American citizens and it's stupid internationally as well.
All righty, coming up, Joe Biden says things are unfolding in Ukraine just the way we predicted.
Well, if that's true, then why are you bad at this?
So here's the thing.
If you predict a bad thing is going to happen and then you don't prep for that bad thing to happen and then the bad thing happens and you didn't prep for it, this makes you an idiot.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so Joe Biden in this press conference yesterday, he says, you know, things are unfolding as we predicted.
He's right.
But the question is, if they're unfolding as you predicted, why didn't you do anything?
Why didn't you do anything?
See, this is the difference between Afghanistan and Ukraine.
So in Afghanistan, they did not unfold as Joe Biden predicted.
Joe Biden thought that the Afghan regime was going to hold in the face of the Taliban, at least temporarily, to give him time enough to get out of Afghanistan, saving face.
That's what he thought.
And he was completely wrong because, once again, he is eight years old.
And he's been wrong on everything.
As Barack Obama suggested, don't underestimate Joe's ability to F things up.
So he was just wrong on Afghanistan.
Then he went out there and he kept lying that things were going just as they suggested.
As American service people were being bombed to smithereens, and as we were droning innocent Afghan families on our way out and handing the place over to the Taliban, as 9 million people are on the brink of starvation.
All of that was according to plan, according to Joe Biden.
But it wasn't.
He was lying there.
But here's the thing.
We've known since November, and they've been spilling since November, that this is exactly what Putin was going to do.
And he still did not have a plan.
That's the amazing thing here.
He still had no plan.
If I tell you I know that there's going to be a hurricane three days from now, but I don't do anything to prepare for the hurricane.
And then the hurricane comes and blows the roof off the house.
And I didn't bother buying insurance.
I didn't bother moving my family.
People get hurt.
That means I'm a moron.
And that's what Joe Biden is.
So here is Joe Biden announcing that things are unfolding as he predicted.
The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation, without justification, without necessity.
This is a premeditated attack.
Vladimir Putin has been planning this for months, as we've been saying all along.
He rejected every good faith effort the United States and our allies and partners made to address our mutual security concerns through dialogue to avoid needless conflict and avert human suffering.
For weeks, for weeks, we have been warning that this would happen.
And now, it's unfolding largely as we predicted.
Okay, so yeah, you predicted it, and then you didn't do anything.
You didn't do anything.
You were asked six weeks ago about sanctioning Nord Stream 2, and you turned it down.
It was filibustered in the Senate.
The Senate Republicans were ready to get rid of Nord Stream 2 before this happened, as a preemptive measure, saying to the Russians, if you do this, it's going to get even worse than this.
And not just that, if you wish to have Nord Stream 2 back, just don't go in, and then we'll talk about reinstating Nord Stream 2.
And Joe Biden's like, nope, we're not going to do that.
So there were no preparations made.
So now Joe Biden says he's going to send 7,000 troops to Europe.
All right, fine.
He's not sending them into Ukraine.
He's just sending them into the border nations around Russia.
We already have a lot of troops in that particular area.
It seems rather unnecessary to add more troops to those areas except to, I suppose, placate some of the NATO nations who now, correctly, are suspecting the fecklessness of the West that has guaranteed its security.
Here's Joe Biden announcing the troop movements.
Today, within hours of Russia's unleashing its assault, NATO came together and authorized and activated an activation of response plans.
This will enable NATO's high readiness forces to deploy and when and where they're needed to protect our NATO allies on the eastern boundaries of Europe.
And now I'm authorizing additional U.S.
force capabilities to deploy to Germany as part of NATO's response, including some of the U.S.-based forces that the Department of Defense placed on standby weeks ago.
Okay, fine.
Good.
I mean, sure.
Is that going to help Ukraine in any way?
Of course not.
So Biden says, if we don't stop Putin now, he will be emboldened.
Oh, you think?
Oh, really?
Oh, isn't that fascinating?
If you don't stop Putin now, he will be emboldened.
Maybe you should have thought of that when you were mocking Mitt Romney for calling Russia a geopolitical threat in 2012.
Maybe you should have thought of that when Barack Obama was pledging flexibility to Dmitry Medvedev.
Maybe you should have thought of that when, you know, under your vice presidency, Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea and just took it over.
And then, fomented insurrection in Donetsk and Luhansk, and created breakaway quote-unquote republics over there.
Maybe you should have thought of that then.
Maybe you should have thought of that when you were handing control of Syria over to the Russians.
Maybe you should have thought of that when you were hanging out as Vice President and helping Russia to broker a deal with the Iran mullah, mullocracy.
Maybe you should have thought of all those things.
Or maybe it's a little late now to dissuade Russia from invading Ukraine because they've already done it, you dolt.
Here we go.
How concerned are you that Putin wants to go beyond Ukraine into other countries and the U.S.
will have to get involved if he moves into NATO countries?
Well, if he did move into NATO countries, he will be involved.
We will be involved.
The only thing that I'm convinced of is if we don't stop now, he'll be emboldened.
If we don't move against him now with these significant sanctions, he will be emboldened.
OK, so he's saying now.
So here's here's where we get to the brass tacks of it.
So he says we have to move on these sanctions because otherwise he will be emboldened and he will do more.
But here's the problem.
Joe Biden doesn't even believe that.
He doesn't believe that the sanctions are going to stop any of this.
He doesn't believe any of that.
So he says that the sanctions will impair Russia's ability to compete.
He starts talking up these new sanctions.
Now, let's be clear what these sanctions are not, as we'll get to.
They're not on natural oil and gas.
They're not on any of that stuff, which is most of Russia's economy.
They're not on SWIFT.
SWIFT is the International Banking System.
There are mechanisms by which the international community can cut Russia off from the banking system.
They're not doing any of that.
And he's not even asking China to actually help isolate Russia.
But the sanctions are going to be wildly effective.
So here is Joe Biden saying that sanctions are going to impair Russia's ability to compete, which is weird because Russia doesn't have any ability to compete.
I love this sort of misapprehension that if you tell the Russians they're going to be slightly poorer than they already are, that this is going to magically make things better.
In what world?
Impair Russia's ability to compete.
It's a backwater.
It's an economic backwater.
The hell is he talking about?
I just spoke with the G7 leaders this morning, and we're in full and total agreement.
We will limit Russia's ability to do business in dollars, euros, pounds, and yen to be part of a global economy.
We'll limit their ability to do that.
We're going to stunt the ability to finance and grow the Russian military.
We're going to impose major, and we're going to impair their ability to compete in high-tech 21st century economy.
What was, I have a question, was Russia competitive in that area?
Without the sanctions, is Russia really very competitive in that high-tech 21st century economy?
Was that a thing that was happening?
This great global superpower?
With, again, a GDP about the size of Florida?
What was that?
OK, so he says that we are going to levy these sanctions and it's going to be they're going to be brutal.
We're going to we're going to impede their ability to actually do things.
OK, but then he's asked some pretty specific questions about what exactly these sanctions are.
He's asked, for example, did you call up China and ask them to help you isolate Russia?
Because that seems like that would be a necessity, as I mentioned earlier, when it comes to economic sanctions.
One of the ways that you avoid economic sanctions is by having a partner in crime.
If Russia can just go to China and China can still trade with the world, then Russia is OK.
So Joe Biden has asked a pretty simple question.
Have you talked with China about isolating Russia and will they help you do it?
And here's Joe Biden's answer.
And are you are you if I could follow up, sir, are you urging China to help isolate Russia?
Are you urging China to help isolate Russia?
I'm not prepared to comment on that at the moment.
That's insane.
He's not asking China to help isolate Russia.
He's not asking.
Now, here's the reality.
He did ask and he was rebuffed, which means he knew this was going to fail from the start, according to the New York Times today.
Over three months, senior Biden administration officials held half a dozen urgent meetings with top Chinese officials in which the Americans presented intelligence showing Russian troop buildup around Ukraine and beseeched the Chinese to tell Russia not to invade.
Each time, the Chinese officials, including the foreign minister and the ambassador, rebuffed the Americans, saying they did not think an invasion was in the works.
After one diplomatic exchange in December, U.S.
officials got intelligence showing that Beijing had shared that information directly with Moscow, telling the Russians that the United States was trying to sow discord and that China would not try to impede Russian plans and actions, the officials said.
The previously unreported talks between American and Chinese officials show how the Biden administration tried to use intelligence findings and diplomacy to persuade a superpower it views as a growing adversary to stop the invasion of Ukraine.
And how that nation, led by President Xi Jinping, persistently sided with Russia, even as the evidence of Moscow's plans for a military offensive grew over the winter.
The Chinese embassy did not return a request for comment.
So in other words, he did ask and he got rebuffed, which means the sanctions are likely not going to work.
And he knows that.
But he went forward with all of this anyway, with no plan.
He's a genius.
What can you say?
He is great at this.
Biden then continued.
He said, you know, we're not even going to cut them off of SWIFT.
That's it.
So here's the things we're not going to do.
We're not going to try to get China.
We're not going to cudgel China into line here.
But right now, by the way, it is important to mention that the DOJ just killed a Trump-era program to ferret out Chinese spying in the United States and prosecute people who are working with the Chinese government on behalf of the Chinese government.
The DOJ just killed it because they said it was racist.
Not kidding.
That's a real thing that is happening in the middle of this.
And then Joe Biden was asked about cutting them off from SWIFT.
He's like, no, we're not going to do that either.
Mr. President, you didn't mention SWIFT in your sanctions that you announced.
Is there a reason why the U.S.
isn't doing that?
Is there a disagreement among allies regarding SWIFT and whether Russia should be allowed to be a part of it?
The sanctions that we've proposed on all their banks have an equal consequence, maybe more consequence, than SWIFT, number one.
Number two, it is always an option, but right now that's not the position that the rest of Europe wishes to take.
Okay, so we are told by the Democrats and by the media that Joe Biden has united Europe like never before, united NATO like never before.
Let me mention some of the other carve-outs that are happening.
So first of all, they're not cutting Russia off of SWIFT, which would actually be a major move.
They're not doing that.
Also, Italy has a carve-out from the sanctions so they can ship, I'm not kidding you, luxury goods from the EU to Russia because they need the oligarchs buying Gucci loafers still.
Very important.
Meanwhile, Belgium apparently got a carve-out so they can continue selling diamonds in Europe.
These people are taking this very, very seriously.
Very seriously, indeed.
Okay, so, after all of this, by the way, Joe Biden was asked about the sanctions preventing things from happening.
And he openly said, no one expected the sanctions to stop anything from happening.
Now, that's a lie.
That is an absolute, overt lie.
Here is Joe Biden lying to you.
No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening.
It's going to take time.
And we have to show resolve so he knows what's coming.
And so the people of Russia know what he's brought on them.
That's what this is all about.
This is going to take time.
It's not going to occur.
He's going to say, oh, my God, these sanctions are coming.
I'm going to stand down.
He's going to test the resolve of the West to see if we stay together.
And we will.
We will.
And it will impose significant costs on him.
So you said the sanctions were not meant to be a deterrent.
I have a clip from your vice president, sir, from five days ago saying that the sanctions are meant to deter Vladimir Putin.
The administration has continually said that retaining those sanctions holds on to some leverage.
But if you believe Putin has made up his mind, what leverage do you really have?
Why not put those sanctions in place now?
The purpose of the sanctions has always been and continues to be deterrence.
But let's also recognize the unique nature of the sanctions that we have outlined.
They're magical sanctions.
They're going to deter.
But now Biden says they're not going to deter.
And then he's asked Joe Biden, so are these ones going to work?
He said the other ones don't work.
You shouldn't expect them to work.
Are the new ones going to work?
Here's Joe Biden saying, well, you know, maybe we'll find out after, you know, like a month.
The sanctions we've imposed exceed SWIFT.
The sanctions we imposed exceed anything that's ever been done.
The sanctions we imposed have generated two-thirds of the world joining us.
They are profound sanctions.
Let's have a conversation in another month or so to see if they're working.
Another month or so?
Ukraine is not going to exist in another week or so.
Maximum another month or so.
So you should experience pain at the pump.
You should follow Joe Biden to the gates of hell for measures that he knows will do nothing.
And that he's not even seeking.
He's not even seeking to bar Russia from SWIFT.
He's not trying to have Russia thrown out of the UN.
He's not trying to cut off all diplomatic ties with Russia.
He's not doing any of the stuff that you would actually do if you wanted to use non-lethal measures of preventing Russia from going further in Ukraine.
He's not talking about even shipping more deadly weaponry into Ukraine right now.
What is he doing?
The answer is he's posturing.
The answer is he is posturing and everyone knows that he is posturing.
By the way, the biggest giveaway that he is posturing is the fact that, again, Russia provides one third of the EU's natural gas.
And that is the one area of the economy that Russia is going to escape sanction on.
You know, like the biggest sector of their economy.
That's like saying that you're going to sanction the United States.
You're just going to avoid sanctioning anything that is done with U.S.
dollars.
So those are sanctions that don't mean anything.
Sanctions.
Alrighty, coming up, even the media can't shield Joe Biden from his own incompetence.
At this point, we'll get to that in just one moment.
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Okay, we're gonna get to the rest of the news in just one moment first.
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It's a show unlike any we have done before.
You get a chance to overhear the conversations that I have with some of my friends, some of the deepest thinkers on the planet.
My first guest was the great Jordan Peterson.
We sat down for coffee for a couple of hours and just chatted the way that we normally do.
The second episode features another good friend of mine, the highly lauded historian, Neil Ferguson.
Neil is a genius, he's a brilliant historian, he's a terrific writer.
In both episodes, we go out for coffee, we have an amazing conversation, and luckily for you, There are cameras rolling, which means we get into everything from sort of our personal lives all the way on down to the Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
The episode with Neil released last night.
It is exclusive to Daily Wire members.
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Speaking of which, as we see the conflict unfolding between Russia and Ukraine, it's very clear dictators are not to be trusted.
And as our country supported Ukraine's move to hand over its nukes in 1994 in exchange for Russia's promise to invade, apparently we cannot be trusted.
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So even members of the media can't shield Biden from his own incompetence here.
NBC's Pete Alexander says, what exactly are you waiting for?
Why are these sanctions so Swiss cheese holy?
Why is it that you have left so many gaps in these sanctions?
You detailed some severe and swift new sanctions today and said the impact it will have over time, but given the full-scale invasion, given that you're not pursuing disconnecting Russia from what's called SWIFT, the international banking system, or other sanctions at your disposal, respectfully, sir, what more are you waiting for?
Okay, so the answer that Joe Biden gave was nothing.
There's nothing that he's waiting for.
He just is not capable of mobilizing anybody in this way.
You've got his entire national security apparatus out there talking about what a grand unifier he is.
On what?
On what?
Fox News' Peter Doocy asked if Joe Biden had underestimated Putin.
Of course, Biden's never going to admit to having underestimated Putin, but the answer is he did.
Putin is an opportunist.
He saw an opportunity and took it.
I'm getting very tired of all these people saying that he's insane.
He's not insane, okay?
This is a very clear move by Vladimir Putin.
It is clearly rational.
It is very bad.
It is morally evil.
But you can do something that is morally evil and very bad and also clearly rational.
From his point of view, expanding the territory of the Russian Empire to include historic Ukraine, and doing so with a meetable cost, and in the process, basically breaking all bonds between the West and independent nations, that's a cost worth paying for Vladimir Putin.
Why wouldn't he do this?
Honest to God, I don't know why he wouldn't, given what he knows of the West.
The Naval Gazing West, which has blown out its debt to the tune of $30 trillion in the United States.
The United States now has a GDP to debt ratio, or a debt to GDP ratio, rather, of 119%.
The United States is busily trying to inculcate diversity, equity, and inclusion into armed forces and putting out commercials about transgenderism in the military.
Why exactly wouldn't Putin make that move?
What would be the overwhelming force that Putin would be afraid of meeting in Ukraine?
What would dissuade him from doing that?
You may think that his ambitions are crazy by your calculus, but that's because you don't understand his ambitions.
He wants to be Peter the Great.
He's actually more like a czar than he is like Stalin.
He's not interested in imposing communism as a worldwide program.
He's interested in the revanchist mentality that expands the Russian Empire.
He wants to go down in Russian history.
Biden wants to talk about history.
Putin wants to go down in Russian history as a great leader.
That means expanding the territorial holdings of Russia, which is historically, like in the 18th and 19th centuries, exactly what Russia used to do.
So why exactly is this somehow irrational?
It's not irrational.
He saw weakness.
He went for the jugular and Biden underestimated him, period.
Here's Peter Doocy asking Biden about it.
Did you underestimate Putin, and would you still describe him the way that you did in the summer, as a worthy adversary?
At the time, he was, I made it clear, as an adversary, and I said he was worthy.
I didn't underestimate him.
And I've read most of everything he's written.
Did you read, I shouldn't say, I'm not a wise guy.
You heard the speech he made, almost an hour's worth of speeches, why he was going into Ukraine.
He has much larger ambitions in Ukraine.
He wants to, in fact, reestablish the former Soviet Union.
That's what this is about.
Okay, well, if that's the case, then why are you not doing anything?
I mean, seriously, it's amazing.
Because here's the thing, they're not.
According to the White House's Dilip Singh, who is one of their deputy national security advisors, he says, oh yeah, don't worry, our sanctions, we're not gonna, we're not, we're actually not gonna target energy.
Only the largest sector of the Russian economy.
We're just gonna, we're not gonna touch that.
Because after all, Joe Biden understands that there's domestic cost.
So he'll tell you that he wants to impose domestic cost, but then he's afraid of actually imposing the domestic cost with something that might actually achieve something.
There is a Dilip Singh.
Targeting the Russian energy industry is totally off the table.
Is that what you're saying, Billy?
What I'm saying is that our measures were not designed to disrupt in any way the current flow of energy from Russia to the world.
Now, we have also said we are going to cut off Russia's access to cutting-edge technology.
That technology can be used across many sectors.
And so, as it relates to Russia's long-term productive capacity, we are seeking to degrade that capacity.
But nothing in the short term as it relates to energy.
Unbelievable.
Meanwhile, Tony Blinken, Secretary of State, doubled down on this.
He says, yeah, we're not even we're not even halting our oil and gas purchases from Russia.
These are top men, very serious people.
Would the U.S.
consider cutting off oil and gas purchases from Russia?
Well, what we're doing, Nora, across the board, is making sure that we inflict maximum pain on Russia for what President Putin has done, while minimizing any of the pain to us.
We're in full coordination with other countries, both consumers and producers alike, to minimize any impact that this may have on energy prices and on gasoline.
Amazing.
So yeah, we're not going to actually go after that part of his economy.
You know, the only part that actually matters.
We're not going to touch that.
We will continue buying.
By the way, not only will we continue buying natural gas and oil from Russia, we will also maintain our restrictions on American energy production.
Here was Jen Psaki yesterday from the White House.
She was asked if they will relieve restrictions on American energy production in order to, you know, increase our own productive capacity to fight off Russia and not be dependent on them.
And here's Jen Psaki being like, no, no, we got to listen to Greenpeace and Greta Thunberg.
I mean, what might happen if Greta Thunberg She got very upset with us.
If she was upset with us, what would we do?
What would we do?
This is what unserious nations do.
If there's an invasion of another country by a big country, there's going to be impacts on the markets, right?
And we certainly anticipated that, and we anticipate that as it relates to the global oil market as well.
So that's why the president for weeks now has been engaging with a range of big global suppliers, some in the Middle East, others, to see what we can do to ensure there's supply out there in the market to reduce the impact on the American people.
Okay, well, so no.
The answer to that question was no.
They will not relieve restrictions on American energy production.
They'll do things like release a little bit from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
They'll talk to OPEC.
But no, they wouldn't want to piss off the environmentalists in their own base.
So how dumb are these people?
How dumb are these people?
John Kerry went on TV in the last two days, and John Kerry literally said that the big problem here is that Ukraine might distract Russia from the real crisis, the climate crisis.
Here's John Kerry, Easter Island head, talking about how Russia needs to help us with climate change.
I'm very concerned about Ukraine because of the people of Ukraine and because of the principles that are at risk.
You know, I think hopefully President Putin would realize that in the northern part of his country they used to live on 66% of a nation that was over frozen land.
Now it's thawing.
And his infrastructure is at risk.
And the people of Russia are at risk.
And so I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.
Well, that's the real important thing.
That's the really important thing, guys.
We have to keep Russia on board with climate change.
And also we have to keep Russia on board so that we can make concessions to Iran, because we have an Iran deal under negotiation whereby we will give a bunch of money to a dictatorship That murders its own people and that threatens Israel with nuclear weapons.
I mean, priorities, guys.
We are a serious country.
We're very, very serious.
By the way, Kamala Harris, for her part, frankly, I'm shocked Kamala Harris didn't solve this problem.
She's such a problem solver.
We have now deployed her to so many places on the globe to solve problems.
We deployed her down to the Northern Triangle to try and stop the illegal immigration crisis.
She handled that.
Have you heard of illegal immigration being a problem in this country for months?
Probably not because she solved it.
You know, she solved it.
We've deployed Kamala Harris to deal with policing in the United States.
And that obviously, I mean, it's not as though murder rates are up dramatically.
We've deployed Kamala Harris pretty much everywhere on earth and everywhere she goes.
It's an unbroken litany of success.
And so when we deployed her to Munich to talk about the situation in Ukraine, we should have expected nothing less than the stellar success we've become accustomed to.
From this vice president of the United States, this most able and capable vice president of the United States.
So here was Kamala Harris touting sanctions.
Her own boss says are going to do nothing.
Today, the president outlined the sanctions, which are going to have a direct impact on Russia's economy, both in terms of sanctions and in terms of export controls.
Those the effect.
We'll be immediate on Russia and we will continue as we have from the very beginning to work with our allies and our partners around the world.
We are unified in our position on this and in our reaction to this unjustified, unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation.
And meanwhile, a State Department spokesperson said yesterday that these new sanctions were intended to shape the next moves, which is weird because basically Joe Biden said that the last sanctions didn't shape Russia's moves at all.
So here is Ned Price from the State Department.
What's the evidence that there is some connection between sanctions that we could impose and that Putin will have his behavior affected in the way that you hope?
Yeah, I want to be very clear, John.
These sanctions are not primarily punitive.
These measures are intended to shape, to contour Putin's next moves.
Contour.
Well, if we use the word contour, then that'll probably do it.
What if we use nuance?
How about nuance and contour?
What if we shape?
What if we mold?
Hey, you and your pretty words ain't doing crap.
Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is firing rockets directly into the heart of Kiev.
Yeah.
Really bold stuff here.
Bold stuff here from the United States and from its allies.
Obviously, it's been so irrational for Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine because he's having such massive costs imposed on him that are apparently accomplishing absolutely nothing.
Well, the good news is that we do have America's celebrities to help us out here in this particular crisis.
And without America's celebrities, what would we do?
So first, we had Joy Behar.
So Joy Behar, from The View, She noted her own disquiet with the situation in Ukraine because she knows the real cost of Russia taking over Ukraine.
It's gonna mess with her trip to Italy, guys.
I mean, the heart breaks just a little for Joy Behar.
We're talking about five million people that are going to be displaced.
I mean, it's heartbreaking to hear what is going to happen.
Well, I'm scared of what's going to happen in Western Europe, too.
Yeah.
You know, you just you plan a trip.
You want to go there.
I want to go to Italy for four years.
I haven't been able to make it because of the pandemic.
And now this, you know, it's like, who's going to what's going to happen there?
Yeah.
I mean, man, if her trip to Italy gets screwed with, wow.
I mean, that's when you know that the world has really gone haywire.
She couldn't get to Italy because of COVID.
And now she might not get to Italy because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
And all those grandmothers with guns trying to defend their apartments from invading Russian soldiers.
I think they should have in mind tonight just a little prayer for Joy Behar and her trip to Rome.
That's really where the The heart breaks, the heart breaks.
But there are some solutions that are being posited.
So for one, there's a woman named Annalyn McCord, who is on what, 90210?
I think she's been irrelevant for a few decades.
But she is suddenly relevant again.
Because she has hit upon the solution to the Ukraine crisis.
And that is reading poetry to Vladimir Putin about how she should have been his mother.
Yes, this is, um, it's a, it's a, it's a weird, it's a weird world.
This lady will eventually be president of the United States, the way we are going.
Here's Annalyn McCord.
Dear President Vladimir Putin, I'm so sorry that I was not your mother.
If I was your mother, you would have been so loved, held in the arms of joyous light.
Never would this story's plight, the world, unfurled before our eyes, a pure demise of nations sitting peaceful under a night sky.
If I was your mother, the world would have been warm, so much laughter and joy, and nothing would harm.
I can't imagine the stain, the soul-stealing pain that the little boy you must have seen and believed, and the formulation of thought quickly taught that you lived in a cruel, unjust world.
Mm.
Mm.
Well, if the hot girl from the OC had been Vladimir Putin's mom, all of this could have By the way, I do enjoy the low-key just bagging on Vladimir Putin's mom.
I mean, the converse of what she's saying is that Vladimir Putin had a terrible mother.
That's obviously why he is the way he is.
Must have been that she just beat him with a stick or something.
That's why he is.
It can't be that he is a geopolitically motivated thug dictator wishing to expand Russia's boundaries.
The real problem is that he has childhood It's that he had social anxiety when he was a kid and his mother didn't hold him and cuddle him enough.
Now what's funny about this is that basically that is the view of the left.
The view of the left is that Vladimir Putin is insane or irrational or pathological in some way and that the way that you get through to Vladimir Putin is kindness.
Kindness.
Maybe a little bit of economic sanctions.
A little bit.
Wouldn't want to go too far.
After all, he has to be part of the family of nations.
We need his help on climate change.
We need his help with Iran.
The world is filled with beautiful people who have different cultures from our own that we will not try to pretend to understand in any way.
We'll just assume they want the same stuff that we do.
And because we assume they want the same stuff as we do, if we offer them that stuff, they'll probably do what we want them to do.
And then when they don't want to do that, then we will assume that it's because they had some sort of brutal childhood trauma and they're pathological.
I'm not sure there's any more solipsistic culture on planet Earth than the culture of the West at this point.
We are so obsessed with our own stupidities that not only do we engross ourselves in these stupidities to the exclusion of world events, but then we assume that everybody else is also engrossed in these stupidities.
By the way, this crosses all political lines.
You see this on the right, you see this on the left.
In the United States, there's this weird habit of assuming that because we have a thing going on here, that this means the rest of the world doesn't matter.
This is the habit of sort of the isolationist right.
Now, we have a lot of problems here.
We have a lot of problems with wokeness in the schools.
True.
We have a problem with critical race theory.
True.
We have a problem with gender fluidity being taught to small children.
True.
Therefore, we shouldn't do anything about Ukraine.
Huh?
That sort of solipsistic navel-gazing is not helpful to people who you know are about to be blown up by Vladimir Putin, for example.
Or to the Taiwanese.
And it turns out that foreign policy does have an impact on your real life, because when shipping lanes get cut off in the South China Sea, all the stuff that you like is no longer available.
And, by the way, when you have rival civilizations that are rising, this also has an impact on the confidence and future of the country in which you live.
I mean, so that's from the right.
From the left, you have this view that really what the people of the world want is the transgenderism.
What they really, really want is a left-wing point of view about democratic socialism expanded to them.
And so if we just cut them a few checks, if we massage their back, if we hold them in the warm embrace of motherhood, then magically they will come around and they will just be the best people.
They will be our friends, because at heart, freedom and liberty will win.
But our style of freedom, our style of liberty, they have the same priorities that we do.
So on the isolationist right, the idea is they have different priorities than we do.
Therefore, we shouldn't care about what happens outside our own borders at all.
And then on the surrender-oriented left, the idea is they have the same priorities that we do.
They just don't know it yet.
So we will try to throw things at them.
We'll try to give them carrots.
And then if they spit in our face, then we will assume that there's something wrong with them.
But there's not much that we can do about that.
After all, deep down in the cockles of their heart, they know that we are right and they wish to live the way we do.
Or, alternatively, all of this is wrong.
And the world is filled with a lot of people with a lot of different ambitions.
And you have to look in steely-eyed fashion at what people want and how they intend to achieve those objectives and whether you seek to impede those objectives with actual measures designed to prevent them from achieving those objectives.
That's how you do foreign policy.
But nobody seems to want to do foreign policy that way.
And that's why you end up with the mess that you have in Ukraine.
By the way, it ain't gonna end in Ukraine.
I know right now everybody's got their eyes on Eastern Europe and Latvia and Estonia.
Lithuania.
The notion that Vladimir Putin is going to invade those particular countries?
I think that's unlikely in the near future.
I think he's perfectly happy with having carved off this giant chunk the size of Texas in the middle of Eastern Europe.
Seems like a pretty good start for his global empire.
But the place we should be looking right now is, of course, Taiwan.
And we're not.
The Biden administration is more focused on all of the things that they say everybody else should be focused on.
Climate change, racial equality and justice, systemic injustice and systemic racism and income inequality and all the other nonsense causes that they've dedicated their lives to.
That's where they're going to focus.
Until precisely the moment that China makes a move on Taiwan, at which point there will again be a lot of naval gazing and some talk about sanctions, but we wouldn't want to sanction China too toughly.
I mean, after all, since the 1970s, we've basically admitted that Taiwan was a part of China.
So do we really have a leg to stand on here?
This pattern will be repeated until the West decides to get lean and mean and hungry again and realize that what motivates it doesn't necessarily motivate everybody else, but that what motivates us is good if we look to the heart of what our civilization ought to be and was.
But until that point, they're going to take the style in line.
You push where there's mush.
You just push as far as you can until somebody stops you.
Ain't nobody stopping Vlad.
Ain't nobody stopping the Chinese yet.
So that means they're going to continue pushing.
So get ready for things to get a lot worse.
Alrighty, we'll be here for another hour later today.
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