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March 1, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:17
Biden Preps For A Pathetic State Of The Union | Ep. 1443
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Biden prepares for his first official State of the Union address as president.
Chaos continues in Ukraine as Putin stares down the barrel of a humiliating setback.
And Democrats prepare to unmask Americans just in time for the midterms.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
Joe Biden giving his State of the Union address tonight.
Ooh, ah, the worst, most monarchic institution in American life.
It's back.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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All right, so Joe Biden is slated to give his first official State of the Union address tonight.
He gave an address to the joint session of Congress shortly after his election in 2021.
But this is his first official State of the Union, and were he an honest man, it would sound like the beginning of Terry Crews' address in Idiocracy.
I know things are bleep right now, but he's not going to say that.
Instead, he's going to talk about how strong the union is because his party needs some sort, some sort of reset here.
If they don't get a reset, they are in such serious trouble that it is beyond reckoning for them.
I believe 31 Democrats have said they're not running.
31.
And that number is going to go up before November in the House of Representatives because the polling is just that bad.
And here's the thing.
Americans know why they're not voting for the Democrats.
Kamala Harris had probably an all-time gaffe yesterday.
She's great at this.
She's just spectacular.
First, Jill Biden actually introduced her as President of the United States, and her husband is sitting right there.
Joe's sitting right there, still wearing his dumb mask for no reason.
And Jill Biden is like, yeah, she's already thinking beyond Joe.
Here she is introducing Kamala Harris as President of the United States.
Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United... the vice president of the United... Everybody knows.
I just said that to make you laugh.
The Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris.
And then Kamala Harris gets up there and she does what she does best.
Babble nonsensically and giggle idiotically.
She is, she is the treasure is Kamala Harris.
So she, um, she said the quiet part out loud yesterday, which is that all the bad stuff that's happening, that's our fault.
So here's what she said yesterday.
As we all know, elections matter.
And when folks vote, they order what they want.
And in this case, they got what they asked for.
Yep.
I went off script a little bit.
She realized I shouldn't have said that.
That's now going to be in every campaign commercial for every Republican for the rest of this election cycle.
People got what they asked for.
Yep, high inflation, war abroad, a disintegrating social fabric.
Yeah, that's what they got, what they asked for.
According to the New York Times, Democratic governors are now looking to Joe Biden for a political reset.
They met in Florida, which is hysterically funny.
So they jet set it over to the state that they hate the most, the hellscape run by Ron Death Sanders.
Uh, by the way, a hellscape from which they basically pulled all their money because they're looking at the polling data in Florida and they know that Ron DeSantis is easily going to win re-election.
According to the New York Times, Democratic governors and their allies are expressing deep anxiety about the political conditions facing their party, as President Biden's approval rating slumps in a year when three dozen governorships are on the line, including in some of the nation's most important battleground states.
At a weekend fundraising retreat in South Florida, several governors, candidates for governor, and donors acknowledged voters' frustration with the lingering pandemic was damaging the party more than expected.
They hoped that Mr. Biden's State of the Union address might serve as a pivot point.
Yeah, because that's what Joe Biden is great at, is pivoting.
Actually, he's more like Ross in the stairwell on Friends trying to shove that couch up the stairwell.
Pivot!
Pivot!
You can't.
The couch doesn't fit, dude.
It's coming at the convergence of three major events that could reorder the existing political landscape.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden's first Supreme Court nomination, and the loosening of many coronavirus restrictions.
And none of that's going to reorder anything.
First of all, that Supreme Court nomination means nothing.
It is not a swing seat.
It is just a replacement of one liberal with another liberal.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is really not going to change anything because the long-term effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are really going to be Rather deleterious to the world order.
And again, one of the reasons that Vladimir Putin went into Ukraine in the first place is because he calibrated wrong.
He thought because of all of the weakness that the West had been signaling for literally decades that he could walk into Ukraine.
And it turns out that the West actually reacted this time.
But the only reason he's in Ukraine is because of all the bad signals that were being put out by the West in Georgia, in Crimea, in Afghanistan, in Hong Kong.
And finally, the loosing of coronavirus restrictions.
We're not going to forget, guys.
We're not going to forget that you did this to us for two years, that you locked our kids down and masked our kids up for two years.
We're not going to just pretend that didn't happen now.
So good luck to Joe Biden on pivoting here.
The environment is not where we want it to be right now, said Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.
Yeah, that would be one of the great understatements of all time.
The environment is not where we want it to be right now.
I believe it's going to get substantially better.
Yeah, you can believe what you want, dude.
as the water began flowing through the gaping hole in the hall.
I believe it's going to get substantially better.
Yeah, you can believe what you want, dude.
Democrats are defending 16 governorships in November, including in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Maine, Nevada, and Minnesota.
Yeah, those are not going to look great, a lot of those races.
Those battleground races have taken on outsized importance after Donald Trump and many in the Republican Party showed an unwillingness to accept electoral defeat in 2020.
In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, incumbent Democratic governors vetoed legislation Yeah, so they're gonna make this into, well, if you don't elect governors to these states where Democrats, then Donald Trump will steal the election.
Yeah, sure.
Go with that one.
I'm sure that's gonna work.
Republicans also see an opportunity to pick up a seat in Kansas, a conservative state where Governor Laura Kelly, a Democrat, is seeking re-election.
In informal poolside chats and closed-door political strategy sessions, attendees considered what could be done to change the trajectory of the president's standing in the Democratic brand.
A new poll from the WaPo, Washington Post, showed Biden with a 37% overall approval rating and a 30% approval rating among independents.
On the retreat's sidelines, several officials expressed frustration with the White House's political operation when granted anonymity to speak candidly.
In interviews, state-level Democrats made clear they want less debate over stalled legislation in Washington and more ribbon cuttings and other events highlighting the economic and infrastructure packages already signed into law.
Yeah, that's going to do it.
What's going to fix this thing is Joe Biden doddering out to podunk Iowa and cutting a ribbon at the dedication of the new Quorum Museum.
Nailed it.
That's definitely going to recalibrate how Americans are feeling about all of this.
We've undersold historic investment in our country, said Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey.
And by the way, you should definitely take political advice from a guy who nearly got beaten by a person whose name I don't even remember in New Jersey and who spent $1.72 running against Governor Phil Murphy in New Jersey.
Murphy said, I just got reelected in the teeth of, and then he cut himself off before noting that people are quote-unquote mad as hell.
He said, they're not necessarily sure why they're mad or who they're mad at, but they're mad and they're frustrated.
Nope, we know why we're mad and we know who we're mad at, dude.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but it turns out we're all mad at you because you suck at your job.
And we know why we're mad.
That would be the ridiculous pandemic restrictions, the attempts to fire literally millions of Americans and treat them as the enemy, the attempt to indoctrinate children in critical race theory and gender Fluidity?
Yeah, we know why we're pissed, dude.
And here's the thing.
The finger is pointed at you, so...
The Democrats are in serious, serious trouble and Joe Biden is looking for a bit of a reset tonight.
So what exactly is he going to talk about in his State of the Union address?
According to the New York Times, President Biden will use his first State of the Union address on Tuesday to claim credit for a robust economy.
And a unified global response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, even as he acknowledges the pain of inflation and the struggle between democracy and autocracy around the world, administration officials said on Monday.
Yeah, good luck with that.
He's going to brag about his economy?
The economy where inflation is outpacing wage growth, and where the Federal Reserve is set to increase the interest rates to fight inflation, which presumably will hamper economic growth, and also where the price of gas is exorbitant, and also where you would like to spend trillions more dollars, this is your plan?
This is your plan?
The speech, which has been in the works for months, was originally meant to focus primarily on the president's domestic agenda, using the rare primetime platform as a way to jumpstart his stalled efforts to pass far-reaching social spending legislation.
Yeah, that would work too.
That would have been really strong.
It's after we spend $7 trillion in blowing up the national debt from $23 trillion prior to 2020 to $30 trillion today, he was going to go out there and talk about his stalled social legislation, and Americans were going to rally behind the old man who can barely spew out a couple of sentences without falling all over himself.
The war in Europe that erupted last week has forced the White House to ensure that Biden's address, quote, reflects a moment in time.
As Jen Psaki, the press secretary, put it Monday afternoon, she said Biden will use part of his remarks to describe the administration's efforts to prevent the Russian invasion and to impose costs on Vladimir Putin of Russia.
So here's the thing about the prevention of the invasion.
It did not happen.
And you know why it didn't happen?
Because you took no preemptive measures to actually punish Vladimir Putin.
You said since November that he was going to do this.
And then you did nothing.
And then he did it.
And then you responded.
And by then, it was too late for Vladimir Putin to pull out.
So you basically cowardiced us into a war.
What you did is you kept saying over and over and over again that we might do something, we might not do something.
It depends on the size of the invasion.
If it's a partial invasion, but not a total invasion, then maybe the sanctions will not be all that bad.
And Vladimir Putin got the impression from the West That nothing was going to happen.
Because after all, nothing had happened in Georgia.
Nothing had happened in Ukraine in 2014 under Barack Obama.
And Joe Biden made signals that not much was going to happen, even if Vladimir Putin was going to go into Ukraine full force.
And so Vladimir Putin went into Ukraine full force.
And now here's the problem, as we'll get to in just a few minutes here.
Vladimir Putin is boxed in, which means that he has no way out but through.
And that means real ugliness, real hideous stuff happening in Ukraine over the course of the next few days.
We're going to watch the evisceration of large civilian centers in Ukraine, if Vladimir Putin's history is anything to guide us.
Psaki said, I think people can expect to hear him position that as the importance of the U.S.
as a leader of the world, of standing up for values, standing up for global norms.
Again, not accurate, considering the Europeans have actually been leading the way, and it's the United States that has been trailing.
The president has earned mostly bipartisan support for his efforts to stand up to Putin, but there has been some criticism from both parties that Biden's team was too slow to impose sanctions on Russia, in part because of a desire to accommodate the concerns of European nations.
In response to that criticism, Biden will describe what Psaki called steps he has taken to build a global coalition imposing crippling financial sanctions on Russian banks, industries, companies, wealthy oligarchs, and Putin himself.
Okay, here's the thing.
Biden didn't do that.
Vladimir Putin did that by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
And it is Joe Biden and his administration, as we'll discuss in a moment, that has actually been holding up sanctions on oil and natural gas because he doesn't want the prices to spike too high in advance of the midterms.
Even as Biden takes note of a global crisis overseas, aide said his speech will remain focused on the two most critical issues in his presidency, the economy and COVID.
Yeah, I'm sure people are going to love that.
Biden will deliver his address to a joint session of Congress as the economy continues to recover from the pandemic-induced recession that caused millions to lose their jobs.
I love how the New York Times biases this.
The president will use the speech to highlight the low unemployment rate, rapid growth in GDP, and the addition of more than 6 million jobs since he took office about a year ago.
If he had just stayed out of the way, it would have been a lot more than that.
The president's feel-good message will be tempered, however, by the growing concern about inflation, which has reached levels not seen in decades.
That gloominess has helped to drag down Biden's approval rating, The president will absolutely use the word inflation tomorrow, Psaki said on Monday, calling it a huge issue on the minds of Americans.
And of course, Biden will urge Congress to spend more money.
The Democrats are seeking to pivot away from COVID just in time for the State of the Union.
However, they are experiencing some Failure to launch.
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So yeah, good luck to Joe Biden on his pivot.
The man can't physically pivot, let alone pivot in terms of his politics.
So yeah, that's not going to work.
But in an attempt to pivot away from COVID, which is what Democrats are trying to do right now, you're starting to see Democratic cities and states opening, getting rid of mask mandates.
And just in time for the State of the Union, as predicted by me a month ago, just in time, you had the congressional doctors say, you know, everyone doesn't have to wear masks.
We don't have to wear masks anymore.
We don't have to do that.
And the masking guidance from the CDC changed as well.
You'll notice that the CDC changed its standards for what looked like a red area in America.
And so overnight, the map changed.
90% of America was a red area with high levels of transmission.
Then the CDC switched its metric.
And now 30% of America is in that category.
Literally on the eve of the State of the Union.
Don't worry, guys.
It's just the science.
We're following the science.
The science of Joe Biden's crappy polling numbers.
Here's Jen Psaki saying mask guidance, that has nothing to do with the State of the Union.
It's just all a big coinky dinky.
Here we go.
The president is very powerful, but he couldn't make us be in the green zone that we're in right now in D.C.
That's why we are not required, we're not going to be required to wear masks starting tomorrow.
So I would say that for him, it had nothing to do with the timing around the State of the Union.
He wanted to give the CDC the time to assess and make recommendations that would be clear to the American public about what their recommendations would be for mask wearing moving forward.
Oh, it has nothing to do with the State of the Union.
It's just a big coincidence that the congressional doctor was like, oh, you know what, guys?
We actually don't want the picture of everybody wearing masks and socially distancing in the audience while everyone is done with the pandemic.
So look at that.
Boom.
Magic.
We fixed it.
Geniuses.
By the way, the Capitol physician did say that everyone will be required to get a COVID test to even go in the building.
So a bunch of Republicans are like, eh, all right.
See you later.
Which is what they all should do.
Because there is no reason to asymptomatically test at this point in time, and we all know it.
So everybody with half a shred of brain in the Republican Party should be saying, I'm not going to go to the state.
This is what Marco Rubio said.
Senator from Florida said, I'm not testing.
I'm asymptomatic.
Why would I test?
Correct.
But all of this is about politics.
There is a Democratic internal memo from a group called Impact Research that was sent out to some of the heads of the Democratic Party.
Just a few days ago.
And here's what it said, quote, after two years that necessitated lockdowns, travel bans, school closures, mask mandates, and nearly a million deaths, nearly every American finally has the tools to protect themselves from this virus.
Now, we can stop right there and just point out that we've had the tools to protect ourselves from this virus literally since last March.
So no, that is not now.
That was a year ago.
It's time for Democrats to take credit for ending the COVID crisis phase of the COVID war, they say.
So what do they recommend?
like vaccine distribution and providing economic stability to Americans and fully enter the rebuilding phase that comes after any war. So what do they recommend? And I'm sure it will be reflected in Joe Biden's speech tonight to clear the crisis phase of COVID over and push for feeling and acting more normal. Good luck saying this to all of the Democrats who you have trained for two years to be paranoid lunatics.
I don't want you to take my side, man.
You've been lying to me.
You've been lying to me.
I literally picked up my family and moved from California to Florida because I don't trust you guys.
And now you're saying you're on my side?
You shut down the playgrounds where my kids used to play in Los Angeles and you allowed homeless people to take over the streets and rioters to burn things down in the middle of the pandemic on behalf of racial justice.
And you expect me to believe that you're taking my side?
Really?
Good luck with that one.
They also say, don't set COVID-0 as the victory condition.
Oh, so you're shifting the goalposts now.
How fascinating.
Some of us said COVID-0 was a dumb goalpost in the first place, but now you're shifting.
So watch for Joe Biden to do all of this tonight.
They also say, stop talking about restrictions and the unknown future ahead.
So watch for Joe Biden to try and swivel away from his own COVID stupidity.
And it is incredible to watch as Democrats try to claim this is all about the shift in science.
It is not about the shift in science.
California, Oregon, and Washington announced yesterday that they were going to end school mask mandates on March 12th.
Why isn't that magical?
They announced yesterday they were doing this.
When is the State of the Union?
Why it's almost as though all the Democrats got on the same page just before Joe Biden's big speech in which he can announce that he and his Democratic friends have ended COVID, which is a lie.
They did not end COVID.
Omicron ended COVID by everyone getting it.
So yeah, no, that is not accurate, but they're all going to do this so that they can claim that the science has changed and now we can all move on together.
Aren't we best friends again?
We're best friends.
Sure, we abused you and beat the living hell out of you for two years, and we destroyed hundreds of thousands of businesses, and we tried to get you fired for not vaxxing.
And sure, we made your small children mask up to their own misery while we were out partying at the Super Bowl.
But aren't we all on the same page now, guys?
Aren't we all on the same page?
According to the Wall Street Journal, California, Oregon, and Washington will end their statewide mask mandates for schools and other indoor settings by March 12th, in a coordinated move announced on Monday.
It's because of Tassians.
It was coordinated.
Now, all of these states have different rates of COVID at this point, but it doesn't matter.
The science says it's time to remove the mask, just in time for the midterms.
California, which lifted its indoor mask requirement for vaccinated people on February 15th, is ending it for unvaccinated people on Tuesday.
Oregon and Washington will take the same step on March 12th, the same day all three West Coast states will no longer require masks inside schools.
They're joining a growing list of other Democratic-led states, counties, and cities that have relaxed or ended mask requirements in recent weeks as the Omicron surge has faded.
New York State said Sunday it would lift its statewide public school mask mandate starting on Wednesday.
Oh, you mean like the day after the State of the Union address?
It's so transparently political.
It's so unbelievably transparently political.
And yet they're the ones who say that we are the science deniers.
Go screw yourselves, guys.
We are not interested.
You know, we know who to blame.
It's you.
You're the ones to blame.
By the way, new data out.
I know we're not supposed to cite data.
Data is very bad.
There's new data out from New York State and Pfizer.
According to CNBC, the New York State Department of Health found that the effectiveness of Pfizer's vaccine against COVID infection plummeted from 68% to 12% for kids aged 5 to 11 during the Omicron surge from December 13th through January 24th.
Protection against hospitalization dropped from 100% to 48% during the same period.
So I look forward to you trying to now claim that you got us out of the pandemic.
That it was you.
It wasn't you who shut down the economy.
It wasn't you who damaged businesses and made kids' lives miserable.
It wasn't you who listened to Randy Weingarten at the National Education Association dictating terms as to when teachers should be in schools.
But it was you who got us out of this pandemic.
If you think Americans are going to buy that for one iota of one millisecond, you are out of your damn mind.
People are not going to buy that and they shouldn't buy that.
So the attempted shift from Joe Biden being a terrible president to a good president based on the end of COVID, which had nothing to do with and actually impeded with many of his measures, That is going to be a fun thing to watch, the President of the United States try to tap dance around tonight.
And then apparently he is going to get to the situation in Ukraine.
That is the other issue that he is going to be discussing, is the continued chaos in Eastern Europe.
And he's going to claim that he has put together a world coalition.
Here's the thing, he didn't do anything.
Vladimir Putin did it.
In the same way that it was Barack Obama's embrace of Iran that created the Abraham Accords by forcing Israel and the Arabs together against Iran, Europe has come together because of Vladimir Putin's invasion, not because Joe Biden is such a wonderful communicator.
Does anyone actually believe that Joe Biden's a great communicator?
You'd have to be crazy to believe that, right?
Well, folks, in just one second, we'll get to all of the issues in Ukraine.
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So here is the latest from Ukraine.
According to the Wall Street Journal, talks between Russia and Ukraine on a potential ceasefire ended with no deal on Monday, as Moscow intensified its assault, killing at least 10 civilians in a shelling attack on residential neighborhoods in the eastern city of Kharkiv and pursuing efforts to seize the capital of Kyiv.
Russian pronunciation is Kiev.
The Ukrainian pronunciation is Kiev.
Something I just found out.
That is why the shift in pronunciation.
Ukrainian and Russian negotiators who met in Belarus just inside its border with Ukraine returned to their capitals for consultations and agreed to meet again in the coming days on the Polish-Belarusian border.
Both delegations said that the five-hour meeting led to some progress.
Well, there's going to need to be some progress here because otherwise The likely outcome of what's happening right now is that Vladimir Putin just ups his game.
That's what's going to have to happen for him.
He can't afford to just lose this war outright.
And so it is very likely that he is going to do exactly what he did to Grozny in 1994 and just bomb the living hell out of civilian centers.
Because he does not care.
He does not care.
He's a very, very bad man.
He is a thug dictator who does not care how many civilians die in order for him to achieve his objectives.
Russia has been pouring large reinforcement convoys across the border on Monday, according to the Wall Street Journal, in what could be preparation for a renewed push to besiege Kiev.
Satellite imagery on Monday from Maxar Technology shows a large Russian convoy approximately 40 miles long moving closer to Kiev.
On Monday night, airstrikes on Kiev picked up.
Russia also fired an Iskander ballistic missile at the capital's Brovery suburb, local officials said.
Russia appears to be preparing for a possible escalation of the war on Ukraine.
In an indication that Moscow may be shifting to a more destructive approach, two residential neighborhoods in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, came under heavy shelling on Monday, likely by multiple rocket launchers.
At least 10 civilians were killed.
More than 40 were injured, with the toll likely to grow because of continued shelling interfering with rescue efforts, according to Kharkiv Governor Oleh Tsianahubov.
It's a war crime, he said.
The city's mayor, Ihor Tarakov, said that the fatalities included four residents who'd left a shelter to get water and a family of two parents and three kids were incinerated when a Russian rocket hit their car.
The pictures of that Russian convoy are rather stunning.
Like one of those movies where you pull out the camera and you just see that it's an endless line of military hardware.
One of the big questions, of course, is how exactly you're even going to get the aid to Kiev because Russia has been encircling Kiev.
can only be resupplied through the West.
If the West is cut off, it's going to be very difficult to get any sort of materiel in there.
The Kremlin on Monday cited Putin's demands for ending the conflict as Ukraine recognizing the 2014 annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia neutrality and quote demilitarization and denazification of the country.
Russia, of course, likes to claim that in the Donbass region, there's a neo-Nazi group that's rather active over there.
This part is true.
And that neo-Nazi group that's rather active over there has been targeting Russian citizens.
That has been the claim of the Russian government that they say justifies this widespread invasion.
Putin's claims, of course, go further than that.
He suggests that the Russian government is just guided outright by neo-Nazis, which is wild, considering that the Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, is Jewish.
President Emmanuel Macron of France spoke to Putin on Monday.
He said the Russian leader agreed during the call to his request not to attack Ukraine's civilian targets and infrastructure and not to encircle Kiev.
In previous conversations, of course, Putin had told Macron that he wasn't going to invade at all.
So that promise is not worth the paper it's printed on, and it's not printed on paper.
Apparently, outside one Kyiv supermarket, the waiting time to enter was about two hours.
We're not going anywhere.
I was born in Kyiv.
I will die here, said Valeria Voitenko, a 23-year-old post office worker whose husband is fighting on the front lines of Kharkiv.
The economic sanctions continue.
Russian bonds have been completely decimated.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the prices of Russian government bonds fell more than 50% Monday as foreign investors grew concerned that Western sanctions would undermine the country's ability and willingness to pay them back.
Russia, of course, defaulted in the late 1990s.
That was one of the earliest crises of the Putin regime.
Moves by the US and European governments to cut off Russian access to the SWIFT banking network might prevent the network from distributing payments to bondholders abroad, emerging markets bond fund managers said.
So people have stopped investing in Russia altogether.
The price on that 5.25% government bond due in 2047?
It's dropped to about 30 cents on the dollar from 120 cents on the dollar.
So those are really, really bad numbers.
It means that Russia is unable to raise any money at this point.
Meanwhile, the blockade on Russia's central bank is neutralizing its ability to avoid sanctions, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The coordinated action blocks the central bank from selling dollars, euros and other foreign currencies in its reserve stockpile to even stabilize the ruble.
So they can't even go on the open markets and they've been stockpiling foreign currencies.
They can't even get rid of those.
Announcing the move Monday in Washington before U.S.
markets open, U.S.
officials said they intended the sanctions to stoke already surging inflation, and the actions against the Bank of Russia are intended, in effect, to neutralize the country's monetary defenses.
The sanctions also target another major government stockpile of assets, a key sovereign wealth fund called the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
And prevent Moscow from using other government and private banks to sidestep sanctions on its financial system, the official said.
In a statement, the fund said the action demonstrates the US has picked the course to destroy constructive dialogue between countries.
China, by the way, came out and suggested, of course, that they are against these sorts of sanctions.
They don't like that weapon because they're afraid that eventually it will be used against them.
Western companies are piggybacking on the official actions by the various governments.
The British energy giant Shell became the latest Western company to sever its ties completely with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, saying that it would stop financing the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which basically kills it outright.
Shell's decision came a day after British Petroleum said it would exit its 20% stake in the Russian oil producer Rosneft.
So it's basically economic nuclear war with the Russian government at this point.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians were at the U.N.
upping the rhetoric.
Here was the Ukrainian U.N.
ambassador who was saying yesterday his name is Sergei Kislytsia.
He said that Vladimir Putin should finish himself off in a bunker like Hitler.
If he wants to kill himself, he doesn't need to use nuclear arsenal.
He has to do what the guy in Berlin did in a bunker in May 1945.
Okay, so he's essentially telling Vladimir Putin to go shoot himself.
He then continued, and this part is pretty amazing.
He actually read from the text messages of a dead Russian soldier.
Many Russian soldiers have already been killed in this particular war.
Here was the Ukrainian ambassador.
Mama, I'm in Ukraine.
There is a real war raging here.
I'm afraid.
We are bombing all of the cities together, even targeting civilians.
We were told that they would welcome us.
And they are falling under our armored vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass.
They call us fascists.
Mama, this is so hard.
Okay, so that is a text message from a Russian soldier back to his parents before he was killed.
This is one of the big problems that Putin has.
Putin had this mythical belief that basically all of the resistance was going to crumble the way that it did in Afghanistan when the United States pulled out of Afghanistan.
And that has not happened, obviously.
The Ukrainian people have solidified and unified against the Russian invasion in the first place.
By the way, it is worth noting here that there is widespread American unity on the question of whether we ought to support Ukraine.
Now, that doesn't mean the United States is going to put in troops.
It doesn't mean we should establish a no-fly zone.
I know there's been talk about establishing a no-fly zone.
That would mean the possibility of direct warfare with the Russians.
That is both unnecessary and unwise at this point, considering both Putin's mindset and his commitment to winning this war.
The last thing you want is Russian planes and American planes occupying the same airspace at this point.
You have to say that the Biden administration is getting this right.
At least this much.
Jen Psaki, yesterday, she said there will be no no-fly zone.
This is correct.
There should not be a no-fly zone over Russia, at least imposed by NATO or the United States.
On military, is there any way in which the U.S.
would support a no-fly zone over Ukraine?
Well, here's what's important for everybody to know about a no-fly zone.
What that would require is implementation by the U.S.
military.
It would essentially mean the U.S.
military would be shooting down planes, Russian planes.
That is definitely escalatory.
That would potentially put us into a place where we're in a military conflict with Russia.
That is not something the president wants to do.
Okay, so she actually happens to be correct about this.
And I am encouraged that the Biden administration, while they have finally gotten on board with, for example, shipping military supplies into Ukraine, while they finally got on board with de-banking Russian oligarchs and de-banking the Russians, obviously months too late and after bad signaling, while they're doing all that, they are attempting at this point to de-escalate.
There has to be a way out here because here is the problem.
Once you've decimated the Russian economy, and if that military material that's being poured into Ukraine is effective in stymying the Russian advance, Then you have to offer some sort of fig leaf for Putin to stop, because otherwise Putin is just going to continue to do what Putin has been doing, which is he's going to make this more brutal and more vicious, knowing that nobody's actually going to get in open conflict with him other than the Ukrainian people.
He's just going to keep upping the ante.
So there has to be some way out offered to Putin here, because otherwise you could see a situation in which he's stymied so far that he actually goes back to the Russian Soviet playbook, which actually suggested that in last ditch scenarios, The Russians could actually first use nuclear weapons in tactical battlefield scenarios.
Remember, nuclear weapon doesn't have to be a missile fired at the United States.
A nuclear weapon could be deployed on a battlefield in order to eviscerate the enemy.
That's long been part of the Russian military playbook.
So you could actually have first use of nuclear weapons since World War II, not fired against a NATO ally, for example, but detonated near, say, Kharkiv, because Vladimir Putin needs the win.
So boxing him in actually makes Vladimir Putin a little bit more volatile.
That doesn't mean that there's any other choice but to box him in.
The crushing sanctions are useful and necessary.
And in fact, we should be harshening the sanctions on the Russian energy sector, which continues to be Vladimir Putin's way out.
We'll get to that in a moment.
But the fact that the Biden administration is simultaneously looking to crush Putin's invasion and also looking to de-escalate is correct.
Whether they're able to achieve that or not may be a different question.
Here was Jen Psaki yesterday saying we would like to reduce the rhetoric and to de-escalate.
Listen, I'm more hawkish than pretty much everybody and this is going to have to happen because otherwise Vladimir Putin is just going to keep upping the ante.
Putin is putting his nuclear forces on heightened alert.
I know you responded to that.
You said this is yet another instance of Putin trying to manufacture a threat that doesn't exist.
But Jen, can you tell us what, if anything, is the administration doing about that threat and how concerned are you about it?
I think this is why it's so important for everybody to know and understand how President Putin uses rhetoric and uses threats in order to justify further military aggression.
That's what we've seen him do in the past.
He has never been under threat from NATO, from Ukraine, from any country.
So what we want to do right now is reduce the rhetoric and de-escalate.
Okay, they actually are going to have to do that.
Because again, once you've boxed in a rogue dictator and you've made him feel as though his only way out is through, then things could get a lot, a lot uglier.
For his part, Joe Biden was walking around outside in a KN95 mask.
I don't understand why he's doing this.
And not answering questions about Ukraine.
Here he was walking across an empty field by himself in a KN95 mask because he is a doddering old man.
Mr. President, is Ukraine winning the war?
There he goes.
And watching that guy walk is, it's like watching Michael Scott do some sort of meeting.
It's just, it's so, man, just don't step in a pothole, Mr. President.
Because, wow.
Oh, there he goes.
N95, alone, outside, across an empty lawn.
There he goes.
He did say yesterday, don't worry about nuclear war.
Now, I'll be honest with you, I really wasn't worried about nuclear war until Joe Biden told me not to worry about nuclear war.
Now I'm a little worried about nuclear war.
Mr. President, should Americans be worried about nuclear war?
No.
No?
Okay.
Well, now I'm a little worried.
The State Department spokesperson, Ned Price, he said that leaders around the world continue to work together to further politically and financially isolate Russia.
This is true, and it is good.
It is late.
Again, the problem is, we have two problems.
One is sort of looking back, and one is looking forward.
The looking back problem is, why did Vladimir Putin invade in the first place?
And the answer is because you push where there's mush.
And Vladimir Putin thought the West was mush, and he miscalibrated.
This, by the way, is how many wars get started, is one side believes the other side will do nothing.
This was, for a long time, the going theory as to how the Gulf War had gotten started, is that Saddam Hussein was given signals by the West that if he invaded Kuwait, nothing would actually happen.
So that is problem number one, is that going forward, you actually have to establish a serious level of deterrence.
You have to make the moves necessary to solidify yourself internally, to rebut any sort of aggression.
And you have to make clear that there will be a price to that aggression.
The United States and its allies didn't do that in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine.
Now the question is how you get out of this and the answer is you do have to crush Putin and at the same time you do have to offer him some way out of this that he is going to take.
Here is the State Department spokesperson.
Leaders from around the world are working together to further politically and financially isolate Russia, including by blocking Russia from international financial systems and economies.
We took further measures against Russia's financial system in response to the Kremlin's flagrant violation of international law in utter disregard for the principles that underpin peace and security around the world.
Well, I mean, all of that is true.
It is also true that the White House and the West still are not getting involved in cutting off natural gas and oil from Russia because they're afraid of the shock on the world markets.
It was Jen Psaki saying that yesterday.
What is the stance of the U.S.
in buying Russian gas at this point?
At this point, are we ready to pledge not to buy any more Russian gas?
So as it relates to Russian gas, U.S.
government doesn't dictate where the U.S.
market sells our own oil and gas products, nor where it acquires crude or refined products for domestic consumption.
This is all up to the private sector, other than exceptions like countries under sanctions.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the long-term impact of what happens in Ukraine.
Because the world order has reshifted.
There is a new world order, but it's more like a new world disorder.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Alrighty, tonight, It's Joe Biden's first official State of the Union address, as we've been talking about.
There's one thing I guarantee you're not going to hear.
Anything true.
That's because the Biden presidency is a giant, giant disaster.
Of course, Biden isn't going to say that.
But I'm going to, because tonight, for the first time, exactly 15 minutes following Joe Biden's remarks before a joint session of Congress, I will offer up my formal response.
You can call it the real State of the Union.
I'm going to tell you where we are really at as a country.
The State of the Union is not exactly strong.
I assure you that my State of the Union response will be free of focus group testing from the GOP.
I will be holding the President accountable.
There's no hiding behind COVID, or blaming rogue dictators, or having Brian Stelter cover it up.
Join me, Jeremy Boring, Michael Molls, Matt Walsh, and Andrew Clayton tonight, 8.15pm Eastern, 7.15pm Central, on The Daily Wire's YouTube channel.
My real State of the Union response will be airing as soon as Joe Biden's address ends on that very same channel.
Make sure to tune in.
you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So if you look at the long-term impacts of what is happening in Ukraine, you're starting to see the beginnings of a really reshifted world order.
So first of all, the Europeans are now actually going to rearm.
The Europeans have decided they're going to get tough and they're no longer going to engage in the delusion where Greta Thunberg Actually ran their foreign policy.
They're not going to do that any longer.
European Parliament announced this morning that they've now accepted Ukraine's application to join the European Union.
A special admission procedure has now begun.
So Ukraine is now going to be joined into the EU.
Meanwhile, you've seen Germany completely U-turning on its entire perspective on foreign policy.
According to dnyuz.com, it took an invasion of a sovereign country nearby, threats of nuclear attack, images of civilians facing off against Russian tanks, and a spate of shaming from allies for Germany to shake its decades-long faith in a military-averse foreign policy that was born of the crimes of the Third Reich.
But once Chancellor Olaf Scholz decided to act, the country's about-face was swift.
February 24, 2022 marks a historic turning point in the history of our continent, said He's announced that Germany would increase its military spending to more than 2% of the country's economic output, beginning immediately with a one-off 100 billion euros, or 113 billion dollars, to invest in the country's woefully under-equipped armed forces.
He added that Germany would speed up construction of two terminals for receiving liquefied natural gas, part of efforts to ease the country's reliance on Russian energy.
He said at the heart of the matter is the question of whether power can break the law, whether we allow Putin to turn back the hands of time to the days of the great powers of the 19th century, or whether we find it within ourselves to set limits on a warmonger like Putin.
The events of the past week have shocked countries with typically pacifist means, as well as those more closely aligned with Russia.
Both have found the invasion impossible to watch quietly.
Viktor Orban, the generally pro-Russia, anti-immigrant Prime Minister of Hungary, who denounced sanctions against Russia just weeks ago, reversed his position this weekend.
Japan, which was hesitant to impose sanctions on Russia in 2014, strongly condemned last week's invasion.
Well, the reason they did that is because they're looking across the water and they see China right there.
In fact, the former Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, he came out and he said that perhaps Japan should consider hosting American nuclear weapons on their soil, which is a massive reversal.
So what we're about to see, primarily when it comes to hard power, is a real military buildup that's going to happen from all of our erstwhile allies.
That's all fun and games until the point at which one of those Durst-Weill allies becomes a not-ally.
It turns out that a wildly re-armed world, as opposed to an American-dominated world, is a much more dangerous world.
Because the fact is that countries have differential interests.
And countries are more likely.
To get into armed conflict when they are armed.
And so the fact that the United States was sort of the global police person.
The United States was the world's global police force.
We may not have wanted that role, but in the absence of that role, what you end up with is everybody fighting with each other.
When the teacher leaves the room, the students begin fighting with one another.
That's just the way the world works.
And so we may be celebrating the fact that Germany is now paying 2% of its GDP for its budget.
And that's good.
It is.
And they should be increasing their military budget to pay for NATO forces.
All of that is correct.
I mean, President Trump encouraged them to do that.
But the sort of newly nationalistic fervor that you're starting to see in Europe, it has a sort of nasty history.
Does it not?
It turns out that the alternative to an American organized global order is A non-organized disorder.
Russia and China, meanwhile, have been moving closer together.
So China came out yesterday.
They said they don't like economic sanctions.
China is looking at Taiwan.
China and Russia are banding closer together with Iran.
Meanwhile, Finland and Sweden are now moving to join NATO as well.
So you're starting to see more and more countries in Europe sort of solidify as part of this broader Western alliance.
So is that a new Cold War or is that more like just a series of discombobulated countries all seeking by this way nuclear weapons?
If you're a non-aligned country, if you're not formally aligned with either one, you're not a member of the EU, but you're also not a member of the China-Russia Axis and there are no mutual defense guarantees, aren't you seeking a nuclear weapon?
Are you doing that like right now?
There's a reason, for example, that Israel sought a nuclear weapon in the 1960s.
It was a non-aligned country, and the idea was that if it was invaded, last-ditch scenario, they were gonna nuke somebody.
In fact, Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel, apparently in 1973, she basically said to the United States, when the United States was not sending material support, she said, listen, if you don't send us bullets, and we are down to our last man, then the nukes go off.
And the United States is like, okay, fine, well, I guess we'll send you some bullets so you can defend yourself in the Yom Kippur War.
But the simple fact of the matter is, Non-aligned countries are going to rearm.
They're going to start seeing more and more countries looking for nuclear weapons.
So the sort of era of widespread peace is coming to an end.
And it's coming to an end because the West had bought into a delusion, and that delusion was the Thomas Friedman-Francis Fukuyama delusion that we had reached the end of history.
And we decided to turtle.
We decided to ostrich our heads for three decades.
And any time a conflict arose, the idea was it was an exception to the rule.
The rule is not a more violent world in which people fight each other and have differential interests and different cultures, look for different borders and all the rest.
Instead, we are going to say that we are moving toward a grand idealistic enterprise in which all economies were interrelated.
And as Thomas Friedman suggested in the Lexus and the olive tree, the golden arches theory, if everybody had a McDonald's, then nobody would fight.
And it turns out that all of that was nonsense.
It wasn't true.
And so the West turtled.
And now Vladimir Putin has shaken the West out of that feeling.
Well, I'm glad that the West has been shaken awake.
I'm a little bit concerned about the effects of a West that already has abandoned the idea of American hegemony, which was the guarantor of world peace really since the end of World War Two.
Meanwhile, by the way, inflation is spiraling out of control and there are going to be some real costs in the West for that.
According to the Wall Street Journal.
Rising inflation is driving up expenses for many large U.S.
pension funds that have promised retirees cost-of-living raises.
So for all those who think that foreign policy doesn't matter, just understand life is about to get a lot more expensive because we didn't take the preventative measures necessary to keep America at the top of the world order.
Foreign policy, just like domestic policy, has consequences.
Okay, we'll be back here later today for an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out our newest podcast, Morning Wire.
Today's episode is available right now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Make sure to tune in.
Also tonight, watch our State of the Union coverage that is starting over on our YouTube channel, Daily Wire, 8.15 p.m.
Eastern Time.
And immediately following Joe Biden's State of the Union, I will be giving an official State of the Union response.
So make sure that you tune into that as well.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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