All Episodes
Previous Next
March 3, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:19
The West Is Running Out Of Tools Against Russia | Ep. 1445
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
As Vladimir Putin reportedly takes a major Ukrainian city, the West runs out of tools to fight him.
And the Biden administration continues working with Russia to help out Iran.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
It's time to stand up against big tech.
Protect your data at ExpressVPN.com.
Slash Ben.
You may have noticed that the world is really, really chaotic.
That things are going kind of garbage.
That we have massive spikes in prices of pretty much everything.
Inflation is approaching 10%.
Well, now it's a good time actually to invest in gold.
I'm just gonna put it right out there.
It's a great time to invest in precious metals today.
An ounce of gold is worth $1,900.
It was worth 300 bucks an ounce in 2000.
I've been telling you for five years you can buy gold from Birchgold.
It is your hedge against inflation and uncertainty in the markets.
And there's another way to hedge against inflation.
You can buy silver from Birchgold as well.
Silver is considered real money.
It is historically speaking undervalued right now by an extreme amount.
It's an industrial metal in high demand for everything from electric cars to solar panels.
Its value has never been worth zero.
Demand is only going to rise.
Some analysts suggest there's an unusual dislocation in price.
That could present very real opportunities for silver to rally over the next couple of years.
Regardless, silver, like gold, is never going to go to zero.
The American dollar?
Yeah, man, that thing is not going to go well over the course of the next several decades.
Call Birch Gold.
They're the only company I trust.
Do not wait.
Start diversifying.
Text BEN to 989898.
Get a free information kit on buying gold or silver in a tax sheltered account.
There's no obligation to get this info.
Text BEN to 989898 to get your free information kit right now.
All right, so the latest in the Russia-Ukraine saga is that Russian forces are now pounding Kharkiv, which is Ukraine's second largest city, with airstrikes in a bid to break the will of the country's resistance, as Moscow's offensive toward Kiev stalled amid fierce Ukrainian counterattacks and logistics mishaps, according to the Wall Street Journal.
So the Russians have now shifted their tactics.
Over the past couple of days, they're going to use sheer, brute, overwhelming force in order to just destroy the Ukrainian resistance.
The basic idea here is that they don't care about civilian casualties.
They don't really even care about the casualties.
With regard to their own soldiers, the Russians are sort of famous for taking extraordinary numbers of casualties in war.
And to get this straight, over the course of the entire Afghanistan war, the United States lost approximately 3,000 American service people in Afghanistan.
According to Ukrainian sources, the Russians have already lost 6,000 people inside of a week.
Now, even if that is exaggerated by a factor of 10, even if it's only 600 people, the fact is that that's happened inside of one week.
The West hasn't really seen a war like this for a very long time, and I think that's why people are going to be shocked by a lot of the images coming out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The reason is because in the conflicts that we've seen in the past, basically it's been the United States, which is the world's most sophisticated military power, by a factor of 10.
The United States spends more money on its military budget than the rest of the world combined.
And our military hardware and our military infrastructure is super sophisticated.
So when we fire a missile, we know exactly where it is going.
The tech on it is better.
Our targeting mechanisms are better.
When you see the United States go to war and we miss, we miss very, very narrow.
And when we hit and we hit somebody innocent, it's because we made a mistake in the intel, not because we hit something we didn't mean to hit.
The United States is extraordinarily precise in its battle plans.
And so when you see the war in Afghanistan, you see an extraordinarily sophisticated military power going to war with barbarians.
And so that means that the casualties on both sides tend to be low because the United States uses really, really precise weaponry in order to do what it wants to do.
Other conflicts that we've watched in the course of the Western world over the course of the last 20, 30 years, Israel versus the Palestinians, for example.
Israel has a very, very sophisticated military.
Its infrastructure is very sophisticated.
Its tech is very sophisticated.
And so it's a big scandal if Israel misses and kills one person.
Meanwhile, you have Russia, and Russia is not a first world power.
Russia is a second world power.
As they suggested, it's a gas station with a nuclear arsenal.
That doesn't mean it's not geostrategically important.
It doesn't mean that it can't cause all sorts of headaches and problems for the West.
It doesn't mean that it can't turn off the gas spigot and cause serious problems for Western and Eastern Europe.
What it does mean is that when Russia goes to war, Russia does not go to war in the same way the United States does.
It does not go to war in the same way that Israel or the UK or NATO does.
When Russia goes to war, Russia basically just uses overwhelming force and kills enormous numbers of civilians.
It sends its soldiers into battle without the proper gear.
It sends its soldiers into battle without apparently supplying its own troops.
And we're now seeing reports that the Russians don't even have the supplies they need in order to fight this battle.
What that means is that the war gets ugly and it gets ground down.
It's very vicious.
Street fighting.
Lots of civilian deaths.
And this has been part of Russia's playbook for quite a while.
They've been using this since Chechnya in the late 1990s.
If you cannot pacify a region, you just start killing as many civilians as you can.
Or at the very least, you try to shock and awe people into surrendering by killing civilians and demonstrating that you are harder than they are.
You do not care how many civilians you have to kill and you really don't care how many soldiers you lose in the course of the battle.
And so the numbers that we've seen out of Ukraine, if you compare them to World War II, they're nothing.
If you compare them to a normal American war, they're extraordinary.
For the United States, we pulled out of Afghanistan after a year in which we lost zero soldiers in combat because Joe Biden suggested that there were going to be too many American soldiers killed.
Russia just lost at a very minimum, as according to the Russians, they lost about 600 troops in the last week alone.
And according to the Ukrainians, it's 10 times that number.
And Russia's willing to absorb that.
So the images that we're likely to see out of the Russia-Ukraine conflict are likely to be worse and worse and worse.
And it's part of Russia's playbook.
It's part of what makes Russia extremely dangerous.
Because again, Russia does not care.
And so part of their playbook is if they start to lose, like really lose, they could They've not ruled out first use of tactical nuclear weapons.
That doesn't mean they're going to fire a nuke into the center of Krakow or something.
It does mean that they would consider, if they were really going to lose a battle, deploying a battlefield tactical nuclear weapon, the first use of nuclear weapons since World War II.
And nobody wants that because then that does require some sort of world response.
And would the world respond to a tactical nuclear weapon being used on a battlefield in Ukraine, which is in the heart of Europe?
How could they, without actually driving a larger Russian nuclear response?
This is the danger here.
The world's in a very precarious situation, and all the economic warfare that has been waged against Russia, which is morally justifiable, and geostrategically justifiable, there's got to be an off-ramp here.
Because if there's not an off-ramp here, the best-case scenario is a guerrilla war that lasts 10 to 20 years in the heart of the continent.
Russia is bombing the hell out of Kharkiv.
They've changed their strategy.
Originally, it was quick occupation.
Now, obviously, it has inflicted extraordinary amounts of damage.
Well, if you wish to protect yourself at home, the best thing you can do?
Actually, get Ring Alarm.
Because I've told you about Ring Video Doorbell.
By now.
Something you might not know is that Ring also makes an alarm.
We rely on it here at the Shapiro household.
Ring does make an award-winning home security system with available professional monitoring.
Best of all, you can easily install it yourself.
I did it myself.
It is simple to set up.
It is easy to use.
I got all of the sensors for motion, doors, and windows that will work on any house or apartment like yours.
I get notified right on my phone whenever anything is detected.
That's why I've partnered with Ring.
So, like me, with Ring Alarm, you and your loved ones can rest easy knowing that Ring is helping to protect your home.
It's more than just security.
You can add sensors that help protect your home from flood, freeze, and fire as well.
My favorite part?
Professional monitoring gives the ultimate peace of mind.
It's part of a Ring Protect subscription.
There are no long-term commitments.
If anything happens, professional monitoring will call you.
You can request emergency services.
Best of all, Ring's professional monitoring is an amazing deal.
You get award-winning professional monitoring for less money than most professional alarm companies.
Ring's got that award-winning alarm.
So head on over to ring.com forward slash ben.
Get a great deal on a Ring alarm home security kit today.
That is ring.com forward slash ben.
Go check them out right now.
So according to the Wall Street Journal, Russian missile debris fell near Kiev's central train station on Wednesday night, damaging a major heating pipeline with a blast wave breaking the station's windows.
Thousands of civilians, particularly women and children, are sheltering in the station at night as they await evacuation trains to western Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials said the missile was shot down by Kiev's air defenses.
In the southern part of the country, Russian forces are really making progress.
They gained a swath of land.
They've now entered the Black Sea port city of Kherson.
For the first time, Russia's defense ministry acknowledged that extensive losses that I was talking about.
They said that 498 Russian troops had been killed, 1,600 had been injured.
Moscow said its forces had killed almost 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers.
Ukraine hasn't released its own casualties.
They said that its military has killed almost 6,000 Russian troops.
Ukrainian officials have put the invasion's civilian death toll at 2,000.
So this is a very serious war, guys.
Kharkiv residents, said the city of 1.4 million, suffered heavy bombardment for the third day in a row, including airstrikes that hit residential areas and civilian infrastructure.
Kharkiv's municipal and police headquarters, as well as the nearby university building, were severely damaged and caught fire.
Local authorities reported 21 dead, 112 injured in the past 24 hours alone.
Moscow says it is not targeting civilians, but obviously they are hitting civilian buildings with a fair bit of regularity.
Russian forces also attempted to seize the city's military hospital, according to local authorities.
The front line held the city, located 30 miles from the Russian border, remained under firm Ukrainian control.
According to Kharkiv's deputy governor Roman Semenuka, he said, we have understood their tactic. They can't enter the city.
Every time they try, we hit them in the teeth. So instead they're trying to sow panic with missile strikes hitting critical infrastructure and residential areas, trying to demoralize us. Kiev was hit by several strikes on Wednesday night.
In fact, there was film that was coming out from CBS News of its reporters.
And behind them, you can see giant explosions in the background.
Ukrainian defenses are still holding on in all the major urban areas under attack, with the exception of that Russian advance north of Crimea, which of course was a Russian base of operations.
If you look at the map, what you're starting to see is that that Russian red move up the map and you're starting to see Russian red move a little bit down the map.
They're having a much tougher time in the north than they are in the south because Crimea, of course, had already been essentially run by Russia since 2014.
There's also talk, by the way, that the Russians may swivel to the west and try to take Moldova.
Moldova is another sort of border country with Ukraine.
It's located between Romania and Ukraine.
Moldova is not a part of NATO.
So any country that is not part of NATO is now living on borrowed time if they are watching what Vladimir Putin is doing right here.
So Kherson was the first major city to fall here.
And again, you can see that the Russian invasion is having some pretty significant success in eastern Ukraine as well as in southern Ukraine.
It's pretty ugly.
Meanwhile, European officials said they expected Moldova and Georgia to follow Ukraine in applying for membership in the European Union.
Expanding the EU eastwards, according to Matina Steves-Gridnev reporting from Brussels for the New York Times, expanding the EU eastwards has traditionally been a divisive topic among older member states.
There's no consensus currently.
The bloc should grow in that direction despite the Russian invasion.
The reason is because the West is very nervous that if they simply say that these places can enter the EU without actually stationing significant military resources there, then Russia could theoretically break NATO just by walking into these states because these states do not actually have enough defenses against Russian predation.
So Russians could walk in and then they could claim victory and then they could claim that they broke NATO because NATO didn't actually defend the territory because they didn't have the wherewithal, the power, the people on the ground to defend the territory at this point.
Meanwhile, Germany has said that it's going to keep rearming.
This is NATO's new move.
NATO is just going to be rearming from abroad.
Germany is going to send 2,700 shoulder-launched surface-to-air rockets to Ukraine in addition to arms shipments the country has already announced.
The Soviet-made Strela rockets were in East Germany's arsenal when Germany reunited more than three decades ago.
So ironically, you now have Soviet-made arsenals being sent to Ukraine to fight off the Russians.
Germany said last weekend it would send more modern, shoulder-launched anti-tank rockets and surface-to-air Stinger missiles to Ukraine after decades of reluctance to send weapons into conflict zones.
Now, all of this is accompanied by some very weird sort of PR moves, and I don't understand them.
So, for example, a university in Milan, in Italy, has decided to no longer teach Dostoevsky?
Because Dostoevsky's a Russian name?
That's idiotic.
Dostoevsky was actually put in a camp because he opposed the Tsarist regime.
So I'm not sure why Dostoevsky, what did he ever do to you?
He's been dead for quite a while.
There's been also an attempt to bar Russian movies from film festivals.
I'm not sure if those Russian creators are somehow complicit in the invasion.
There's been an attempt to Take Russian assets without proper evidence that those Russian assets are linked to the attack on Ukraine.
There's been an attempt to bar Russian athletes from participating in meets.
I don't know why those people should pay for the sins of Vladimir Putin, and I don't think it's going to convince Vladimir Putin to stop doing what he is doing.
That seems foolhardy almost all the way across the board.
With that said, The problem here is that the West is running out of tools.
So again, the newest tool that the West is using is to try and resupply.
According to the New York Times, the Dutch are sending rocket launchers for air defense.
The Estonians are sending Javelin anti-tank missiles.
The Poles and Latvians are sending Stinger surface-to-air missiles.
The Czechs are sending machine guns, sniper rifles, pistols, and ammo.
Even formerly neutral countries like Sweden and Finland are sending weapons.
Germany, long allergic to sending weapons into conflict zones, is sending Stingers as well as other shoulder-launched rockets, according to the New York Times, in all about 20 countries.
Most members of NATO and the EU, but not all, are funneling arms into Ukraine to fight off Russian invaders in armed insurgency if the war comes to that.
At the same time, NATO is moving military equipment and as many as 22,000 more troops into member states bordering Russia and Belarus to reassure them and enhance deterrence.
According to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU, she said European security and defense has evolved more in the last six days than in the last two decades.
Brussels has moved to Europeanize the efforts of member states to aid Ukraine with weapons and money, put down a marker for the bloc as a significant military actor.
But whether European weaponry will continue to reach the Ukrainian battlefield in time to make a difference is far from certain.
It's a strategy that risks encouraging a wider war, possible retaliation from Putin.
Putin already sees NATO as committed to threaten or even destroy Russia through its support for Ukraine.
That is what he has said over and over and over again.
And this is the excuse that Putin has used all along, is that these evil Westerners, they keep provoking me by allowing Ukraine to move toward the West.
One of the people who's been promoting that idea is John Mearsheimer, most famous for his idiotic book with Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S.
Foreign Policy, in which he suggested that essentially the Jews control American foreign policy.
So Mearsheimer also has similarly idiotic ideas with regard to Russia and Ukraine.
He did an interview with The New Yorker trying to say that the West is at fault for Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
He said, I think all the trouble in this case really started in April 2008 at the NATO summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO.
The Russians made it unequivocally clear at that time.
They viewed this as an existential threat.
They drew a line in the sand.
Nevertheless, what has happened with the passage of time is that we have moved forward to include Ukraine in the West to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia's border.
Of course, this includes more than just NATO expansion.
NATO expansion is at the heart of the strategy, but it includes EU expansion as well.
It includes turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.
And from a Russian perspective, this is an existential threat.
So he doesn't explain why that's an existential threat.
Why is Ukraine being a liberal democracy an existential threat to Russia?
There has not been a single attack launched, as far as I'm aware, across the Russian border by Ukraine.
This is not like Lebanon attacking Israel or something.
Ukraine has not been used as a staging ground to attack Russia.
Russia used to occupy Ukraine.
Then the Soviet Union crumbled and Ukraine became an independent territory.
At the point that Ukraine became an independent country, they now had the ability to ally themselves with the West if they so chose.
And the fact that NATO already exists on Russia's border in the form of Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia, effectively.
Why exactly would Ukraine be any different?
Mearsheimer's suggestion that America is trying to turn countries into pro-American liberal democracies.
First of all, even if we were, I don't see the big problem.
I'll be honest with you, I'm missing the part where that's bad.
But second of all, we're not.
I mean, Ukraine became a pro-America liberal democracy of its own accord.
They've had democratic elections multiple times, and they've shifted.
Sometimes they're more pro-America, sometimes they're less pro-America.
If a country decides of its own accord that it wishes to ally itself with Western democratic values, why should Russia see that as an existential threat?
We're not trying to overthrow the Russian regime, and we've made no attempts to do so.
More on John Mearsheimer's take that the United States is responsible for Ukraine being invaded by Russia, which is a self-defeating and illogical take.
I'll explain why in just one moment.
First, you need home insurance.
By law, in many states, you need home insurance.
And finding home insurance, most people do it by word of mouth, which is not an efficient way to do this thing, because then you're only competing with nobody.
Basically, your friend tells you to get home insurance from X company.
You do so.
You've never checked out other prices.
You just do so based on pure faith.
Why would you do that?
You don't shop for anything else that way.
Instead, head on over to PolicyGenius.com slash ShapiroHome and find the insurance you need.
You answer a few questions, PolicyGenius shows you price estimates for policies that fit your search and help you understand your options.
The PolicyGenius team can look for ways to save you more money.
And if they find a better rate than what you're paying right now, they'll switch you over for free.
PolicyGenius has saved customers an average of $1,250 per year over what they were paying for home and auto insurance.
The PolicyGenius team works for you, not the insurance companies.
You can trust them to offer unbiased help and advocate for you at every step until you are covered.
PolicyGenius doesn't add on those extra fees.
They don't sell your information to third parties.
PolicyGenius has thousands of five-star reviews across both Google and Trustpilot.
Head on over to PolicyGenius.com slash ShapiroHome.
Get your free home and auto insurance quotes.
See how much you could save today.
Mearsheimer says, this is not imperialism, this is great power politics.
When you're a country like Ukraine and you live next door to a great power like Russia, you have to pay careful attention to what the Russians think because if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they're going to retaliate.
States in the Western Hemisphere understand this full well with regard to the United States.
Yes, but that assumes that the Ukrainians didn't of their own accord attempt to join the pro-America bloc in the EU.
It assumes that really it was just the United States that had been promoting this.
That we had overthrown the popular sentiment in Ukraine and wanted to join Russia.
But as the war is currently proving, Ukrainians do not want to join Russia.
Like, at all.
Listen, I understand Russia pursuing its own interests here.
I do.
I get it.
That does not mean that we quote-unquote provoked it.
What it means is that Russia pursuing its own interests is in direct opposition to the interests of the people of Ukraine.
If you wish to take all of the morality out of the situation, yes, Russia is making a power move, and then the West is making a power move back.
But that does not mean a moral equivalence between the West and Russia, which is a gas-powered thugocracy.
Mearsheimer says, when you try to create a world that looks like that, you end up with the disastrous policies the United States pursued during the unipolar moment.
We went around the world trying to create liberal democracies.
Our main focus, of course, was in the greater Middle East.
You know how well that worked out?
Not very well.
So according to Mearsheimer, it is not a predation when Russia invades Ukraine.
It is a predation when we attempt to push Ukrainian politics in a pro-American direction.
That just sounds like anti-American politics to me.
If you were really interested in just great power politics, I don't see his objection to the West doing what it was doing.
I mean, we're a great power as well.
So either you object to both or you object to neither.
You can't pick and choose.
This has been used as a sort of crutch by people who are arguing against Western involvement in Ukraine.
The bottom line, however, is that we are running out of weapons with regard to deterring Vladimir Putin.
And this was the big problem.
If you don't deter the action, and then the action happens, your tools shrink dramatically.
If you've already levied sanctions, and you say to Vladimir Putin, listen, let's say we had canceled Nord Stream 2.
Let's say we never greenlit Nord Stream 2 before this.
And we had said to Putin, if you don't invade, then we'd be happy to discuss the opening of Nord Stream 2.
That seems like more of a carrot.
If we had canceled Nord Stream 2, and we said, listen, we're hearing rumors you're going to go into Ukraine.
You go say, I guarantee you're not going into Ukraine.
We're happy to remove the sanctions.
We'll go back to status quo ante.
Perhaps Putin doesn't go into Ukraine.
We'd spent not the last 30 years.
Steadfastly ignoring predations by the Chinese in Hong Kong and ignoring predations by the Russians in Georgia and Crimea.
If we had not done that, perhaps Vladimir Putin wouldn't have been convinced, as he apparently was, that the world was a paper tiger and would do nothing in the face of a Russian advance.
Now that he has gone in, the tools radically shrink.
Because what can you do to him that you haven't already done?
Not all that much.
Basically, we're already doing it.
We've levied these major economic sanctions.
We have rearmed the opposition in Ukraine the best that we can.
And so, the West's options are shrinking and shrinking fast, as the Wall Street Journal points out today.
They say seven days into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the U.S.
and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies are coming under increasing pressure to do more to help Ukraine, even as they face diminishing options for doing so.
As Russia continues to push to capture urban areas, one of the more drastic options discussed publicly has been a no-fly zone that would stop Russian aircraft from launching strikes over Ukraine.
The idea has been dismissed by the United States and NATO countries.
The reason being, we don't want to be in a direct conflict with the Russians.
Not because we wouldn't win.
We would.
I mean, we'd shoot down all of their jets in a matter of moments.
We have a much more sophisticated military.
I mean, the Ukrainians are shooting down Russian jets right now, and they have Soviet-era weaponry.
If NATO got directly involved in this conflict, and there were no fears of broader conflict or tactical nuclear warheads, this conflict would be over already.
Russia does not have anything like the military power in the conventional sense necessary to stop NATO or the United States, for example.
But that's not really the question.
The question is bleed over.
The question is, does Russia then start attacking actual NATO states?
Does it start launching those tactical nuclear weapons?
That really is the question.
And that's what Putin was saying, right?
When Putin raised the nuclear alert, what he's saying is, do not do a no-fly zone because if you do, you're just going to push me further and you've already seen how far I'm willing to go.
Creating a continuous effective no-fly zone over Ukraine, particularly with several NATO nations, would require several hundred planes not only to uphold the no-fly zone, but to support those aircraft maintaining that no-fly zone.
In addition, air force across multiple nations would have to coordinate, and should Russia attack NATO member aircraft, that would be seen as an attack on the 30-member alliance, and at that point you do have a world war.
The British government has said it would instead continue to impose more sanctions.
Sanctions, however, are not having an immediate impact on the battlefield, as Western leaders have acknowledged.
Officials hope that the unprecedented economic hit will bite the Russian economy rapidly, meaning that as the bombs fall on Kiev, there will be Russian bank runs and Russian businesses collapsing, showing real-world consequences for Putin.
But that's going to mean... Basically, there are only a few scenarios here left on the table.
Scenario number one is that the Russian oligarchs take a look at Putin.
They say, you're destroying our livelihoods, you've destroyed our holdings, you're getting Russian soldiers killed, you need to go.
And the Russian military turns on Putin and they oust him.
That is the wild hope.
That is hope number one.
It's never worked anywhere else, but that is sort of the hope here.
Okay, so good luck with that.
Then there is situation number two, and that is a large-scale guerrilla war that carries on the continent for 10 to 20 years, according to intelligence sources, in which Russia uses the overwhelming bulk of its force to take Ukraine, installs a puppet dictator, and then the Ukrainian people just resist for the next couple of decades with help from the West.
Very, very ugly canker growing in the middle.
of Europe, with extraordinary repercussions for the border states around Ukraine already.
A million refugees have been swamping the border.
Hundreds of thousands of them have been moving into Poland.
Whenever you have a major international crisis like this, whether it is in Libya or whether it is in Ukraine, and Ukraine's a lot closer than Libya, you end up with a situation with huge refugee issues and massive overflow into the West, which creates significant domestic problems for Western European countries at the very, very least.
Plus an emboldened Russian state, which has taken it and really has no reason not to try and break the NATO alliance even further.
So what exactly does Vladimir Putin have to lose at this point?
We have now hit him with the largest economic sanctions probably in world history.
We have him isolated on an international level from everybody except for maybe India, China.
And Iran.
And yet, he continues going.
So what exactly can we do to get him to an off-ramp?
We'll get to that in just a moment.
First, let's talk about the simple fact that when you eat something good, the first thing you think is, this is gonna cost me a lot of calories, right?
I mean, if it tastes good, it's probably gonna make me fat.
What if eating healthy tasted great?
I know, it sounds impossible, but Tessa Mays has found a way to make that magic happen for you with their award-winning ranch dressings and vinaigrettes.
Tessa Mays is an American-made company started by three brothers with a dream to share their mom's recipes with the world.
Tessa Mays puts flavor and quality above all else because of that.
They quickly became the number one organic dressing brand in the country.
All of their products are manufactured here in the U.S.
They have a wide variety of kosher products like their avocado ranch and lemon garlic dressing and marinade.
We've been enjoying that at the Shapiro household, let me tell you.
Kids, parents, grandparents, they can all agree on one thing.
Tessa Mays dressings are great on everything, whether you are dipping wings, Or you're pouring it on pizza or putting it on a salad.
Tessa Mays makes every meal better.
These guys are the embodiment of the American dream.
They're bringing manufacturing back to the United States.
Their products are amazing.
Yeah, I'm eating salad now thanks to Tessa Mays.
Seriously.
Go to tessamays.com.
Use promo code Ben for 15% off all of their amazing products.
That's tessamays.com.
Promo code Ben.
That's spelled T-E-S-S-E-M-A-E-S.com.
Promo code Ben.
And then there's scenario number three.
Scenario number three is an off-ramp.
And this is kind of what everybody is looking for at this point, except for maybe Putin.
So while we talk about how we have the whip hand over Putin, that really isn't true.
Putin has the whip hand because whoever has the least to lose is the person who is also least likely to come to the table.
And at this point, what exactly does Putin have to lose?
They took the economic hit.
They're going to continue to take the economic hit.
Vladimir Putin doesn't care about the economic hit.
If he feels that he can maintain his position at the head of the Russian thugocracy only by winning the war in Ukraine, why would he stop?
Why would he stop?
What concessions could the West make that would dissuade him?
And it's unclear at this point what concessions would look like in that case.
So you have to hope for scenario number one and number three, but it looks like the most realistic scenario is scenario number two.
You can see that the Biden administration is pushing for scenario number three.
John Kirby over at the Pentagon, he says, we'd like to see Moscow take the temperature down about the nukes.
Yeah, I'm sure we would.
I mean, yes, we would like to see all the temperatures decreased at this point.
We'd certainly like to see Moscow reciprocate by taking the temperature down on rhetoric about nuclear posture.
We certainly would like to see him de-escalate by coming to a ceasefire and de-escalating and moving those forces back home and getting out of Ukraine.
So, he is correct about this.
And the Biden administration, again, the mistakes that the Biden administration made were mistakes that were made before the invasion.
What the Biden administration has done since the invasion is the correct thing.
And that's not because they somehow rallied the world or because Joe Biden is a great politician.
It's because this is what happens in politics.
A thing happens, everybody reacts to the thing.
That is what has happened in Eastern Europe right now.
According to Secretary of State Tony Blinken, the United States is monitoring the shelling of civilians.
He says that the Russians have really ratcheted things up in the last couple of days.
We've certainly seen in the past that one of Russia's methods of war is to be absolutely brutal in trying to cow the citizenry of a given country.
And that includes, at the very least, indiscriminate targeting and potentially deliberate targeting as well.
We're looking very closely at what's happening in Ukraine right now, including what's happening to civilians.
We're taking account of it.
We're documenting it.
And we want to ensure, among other things, that there's accountability for it.
What sort of accountability, though?
The problem is weakness breeds weakness.
If you didn't stop it before it started, it's very difficult to start it now, which is why Joe Biden, correctly, was saying yesterday that while it's clear that Russia is targeting civilians, he's not sure if it's war crimes yet.
The reason that Biden is saying that, he knows it's war crimes.
When I say he's correct, What I mean is that Joe Biden is looking for that off ramp.
He's desperately looking for Vladimir Putin to take that off ramp, which is what the West has to hope for at this point.
Because if Putin doesn't, then you're going to end up with scenario number two, which is that large scale, long lasting occupation of a country that does not want to be occupied, dead center of Europe.
Here is Joe Biden trying to take down the rhetoric.
Russia is committing war crimes.
We are following it very closely.
It's early to say that.
By disrespect, he's intentionally targeting civilian areas.
There are over 2,000 civilian deaths right now.
There they are.
Okay, so again, he's admitting that they're doing it, but at the same time, he won't say they're doing it.
This would be all well and good and sort of the sort of normal way this would proceed, I mean, there's no normal here, but this is sort of the understandable way in which this would proceed, except for the fact that this administration continues to be very, very unserious about Russia with regard to ancillary issues.
So if you're seeking to dissuade Russia from doing what it is doing, you do need to cut off relations with them.
You do need to stop attempting to work with them on issues supposedly important to them.
And you actually do need to call on the American people to make a sacrifice.
Now Joe Biden said in the State of the Union that you will have to make a sacrifice.
Then he wouldn't actually detail what the sacrifice was.
Because here's the problem for Joe Biden.
In the sense that weakness breeds submission.
And so Joe Biden's weakness brought about this conflict.
They pull out from Afghanistan and bolden Putin.
Several months of us saying that NATO alliances were split and that a minor incursion might not merit any sort of response.
That all of that encouraged Putin's invasion.
That means that he has now brought this about.
And so now he's trying to split the baby because instead of saying, listen, we have to bring the harshest sanctions we possibly can.
That might mean higher prices at the pump.
And we are also going to have to tell the left.
We're going to have to tell people on the progressive left that we are going to put our environmental policies on hold because we need to compete with Russia.
We need to compete with China.
We need to be energy independent.
That is a national security issue.
Instead of Joe Biden saying that to his left.
And instead of saying to everybody else, and that means that temporarily your gas prices are going to go up, but this is what it means to be the leader of the free world.
Instead of Joe Biden saying any of that, they just refuse to say any of that.
So Jen Psaki said yesterday that we are thinking about energy sanctions, but we're still importing 600,000 barrels of Russian oil every day because after all, we have to minimize the price impact on Americans.
So he's a coward.
Because if you're going to be a leader, that means you sometimes have to say things you know will be unpopular to the American people.
Joe Biden is willing to do that.
Here's Jen Psaki.
We want to minimize the impact on the global marketplace, and that includes the global oil marketplace and the impact of energy prices for the American people.
So that's one of the factors that we really look at.
We're considering it.
It's very much on the table, but we need to weigh what all of the impacts will be.
We're not trying to hurt ourselves.
We're trying to hurt President Putin and the Russian economy.
Okay, but if you're trying to hurt the Russian economy, it's going to hurt them a lot worse than it's going to hurt us.
I mean, we'll pay some more at the pump.
It'll devastate his economy.
By the way, Germany is willing to undertake the sacrifice.
Germany, which until five seconds, I mean, they get like half of their power.
Literally half of their natural gas comes from Russia and they've cut it off.
Their prices have gone up 100% over the course of the last week because they understand that sometimes you need to take the hit in order to do the right thing.
I can't believe I'm saying that about the German government, but that's the reality.
They won't even tell their left that they are trying to move back toward ramping up oil production because, God forbid, the environmentalists who love Greta Thunberg, and she's so angry at you, she's so upset, they might piss off an 18-year-old Norwegian teen or whatever.
Here is Biden advisor Cedric Richmond saying yesterday, we still need to pass the climate agenda.
That's the real solution here is green energy.
Good luck with that.
We've put a solution on the table, and that is to pass legislation that will lower Americans' everyday costs, lower their health care.
If we pass our climate agenda, we would lower energy prices for the average American family by $500 a month.
We can reduce the expenses that they're paying for child care, which on average is about $14,000 a year, and we would cap it at 7% a year.
Income.
We would limit the amount that people would pay for prescription drugs.
Insulin, for example, we'd cap at $35.
Those things... Respectfully, those are good ideas to ease the burden on Americans, but those are months away, if ever.
Okay, and they're not only months away, they're not going to happen.
And not only are they not going to happen, they're very, very bad ideas.
They raise the national debt.
They create more inflation.
They're very bad.
It's just an unserious administration.
It's an unserious administration flying by the seat of its geriatric pants.
This guy, man, this administration just continues to crap the bed.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, the greatest of all expositors on both foreign and domestic policy, she was asked about what we are going to do, and she brought out her favorite line.
We are going to do what we've always done, and it is always that time.
See, the first time she said this, I thought it was a gaffe.
The second time, I think she actually thinks she knows what she's talking about.
It's kind of crazy.
So what else do we have to throw at this when Putin so far is undeterred?
Well, we are going to continue to do what we've done.
For example, in the sanctions, it's been sanctions against their financial institutions, against their oligarchs, where we are targeting their mansions and their jets.
What we are going to continue to do is stand firm with our allies in terms of reassessing what we are doing with sanctions.
Everything is on the table for consideration, frankly.
We're going to continue doing what we've always done.
But then Harris was asked, OK, so are we going to cut off their energy supplies?
Are we going to cut off the energy markets?
And she refuses to answer the question.
And then she just speaks mashed potatoes.
As it relates to what we need to do domestically as well as what we need to do in terms of this issue generally, we have, as the president said, re-evaluated what we're doing in terms of the strategic oil reserve here in the United States to make sure that it will not have an impact or we can mitigate the impact on the American consumer.
But let's take this one step at a time.
Okay, so thank you for that gobbledygook, Vice President Harris.
By the way, the Biden administration, when I say they're unserious, I mean they are deeply unserious when it comes to Russia in many, many ways.
The most obvious way is that they are still using Russia to broker a deal with the Iranian mullahs, the greatest exporters of terrorism on planet Earth, the Iranian government, which has destabilized regimes ranging from Yemen to Syria to Lebanon.
Which has sought to start wars with Saudi Arabia, with Israel, funded Hamas.
This regime, the United States is currently attempting to sign some sort of deal with them that is not going to achieve anything that would remotely look like an American interest, just because Joe Biden has these vanity projects.
It's amazing how one politician's vanity can really drive America off the road and into a ditch.
That's what happened in Afghanistan.
Joe Biden had a vain idea that he was going to end the war in Afghanistan, come hell or high water.
13 Americans died because he did that.
Millions of Afghans are going to starve.
19 million Afghan women will be subject to sexual abuse and predation and living under tyranny.
Thousands of Americans were left behind.
All because Joe Biden is a vain old man.
And the same thing is happening in Iran right now.
Joe Biden wants to sign an Iranian nuclear deal and he wants the Russians to broker it.
Well, the Russians are currently invading Ukraine.
He has got his envoy, Robert Malley, who is just a wild, terrible anti-Israel force in American foreign policy.
He's been garbage for years.
He's got Robert Malley negotiating this thing.
And Robert Malley, without the consultation of any of our supposed allies, you know, like Saudi Arabia or Israel or the UAE or any of those, he's negotiating a deal with the Iranians, brokered by the Russians, brokered by the Russians.
The Russians are currently murdering civilians in Ukraine.
And the United States, on the one hand, is like, we're going to sanction the hell out of them.
We're going to take care of this.
We're going to do it.
And on the other hand, they're going to the Russians and saying, can you help us broker a deal with a country even worse than you?
Can you make that happen for us?
A deal that will end, by the way, with Iran in charge of nuclear weapons and with more money.
That's what that deal will end with.
Because that's what the JCPOA was.
That was Obama's plan.
According to Gabriel Naranja, reporting from SASC, he's a former Iran official at the State Department, he says, my former career State Department, NSC, and EU colleagues are so concerned with the concessions being made by Robert Malley in Vienna, they've allowed me to publish some details of the coming deal in the hopes Congress will stop the capitulation.
One warned what's happening in Vienna is a total disaster.
The entire negotiations have been filtered and essentially run by Russian diplomat Mikhail Ulyanov.
The concessions and other misguided policies have led three members of the negotiating team from the United States to leave.
Niranha says this is a long and technical thread.
Here's what you should know.
The deal being negotiated in Vienna is dangerous to our national security.
It is illegal.
It is illegitimate.
It in no way serves U.S.
interests in either the short or long term.
Here is why.
Led by Robert Malley, the United States has promised to lift sanctions on some of the Iranian regime's worst terrorists and torturers, leading officials in the regime's WMD infrastructure, and is currently trying to lift sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard itself.
Biden seems preparing to rescind the Supreme Leader's Office Executive Order as soon as this coming Monday, and lift sanctions on nearly every one of the 112 people and entities sanctioned under it, even if they are sanctioned by other legal authorities.
Some of the people who have been sanctioned are people like Mohsen Rezaei, who was involved in the 1994 AMIA bombing that killed 85 people in Argentina, who will be able to live free of sanctions next week if Malley has his way.
Other people who will be living free of sanctions We'll be people like Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor to the Supreme Leader Khamenei, who was charged in Argentina for homicide for that terrorist attack and also propped up Assad's brutality in Syria.
According to Naranja, it's important to note the Supreme Leader's office EO was not at all related to Iran's nuclear program.
The removal of those sanctions under a so-called nuclear deal is a farce.
The State Department lawyers know better.
They were forced into this by Malley.
He says also sanctions will be lifted on huge swaths of the regime's economic and financial arms that were supporting the Iranian terror repression and WMD infrastructure.
Says the U.S.
is not lifting sanctions on the Basij responsible for killing thousands of Iranian protesters itself because the Iranians didn't care.
They just want the sanctions on the funding mechanism lifted.
And that's what Malley did.
The sanctions are not even related to Iran's nuclear program, but we're going to lift sanctions on those anyway.
So you've got America trying to lift sanctions on Iran, being negotiated by the Russians while we are telling the Russians that they have been banned from the international community, so to speak.
They also want, by the way, the Iranians haven't even accepted the deal yet.
They haven't even accepted the deal.
All that has to happen for them to accept the deal is that the United States will remove IRCG, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list and sanctions if the Iranians promise to talk about new negotiations.
If they promise.
Apparently, the Iranians have not accepted that offer yet because they want the unconditional removal of the terror organization designation.
For all of these concessions, we get nothing from the Iranians.
Nothing.
And that is precisely what is happening.
This administration is totally unserious.
It's an unserious administration.
And so we shouldn't be surprised that the Russians are treating us with a lack of seriousness.
They're willing to accept the blows that they've taken thus far.
And so that means that the best we can do is offer them some sort of carrot.
Because the stick ain't working.
Alrighty, coming up, the U.S.
economy is about to hit the skids.
We'll talk about that in just one second.
But first, if the American economy is about to hit the skids, wouldn't that now be an excellent time for you to refinance your home?
Like now?
Not tomorrow?
Not a week from now?
Like today?
You need to call up my friends over at American Financing, America's home for home loans.
Because right now, You still have access to rates near record loads.
They're not going to be that way much longer.
The Federal Reserve is already talking about increasing those interest rates.
You're already starting to see mortgage rates start to jump.
Do not wait, because if you wait a lot longer, the good interest rates that we got right now, they just are not going to be there.
Go to American Financing right now.
You'll learn about custom loans that can save you up to a thousand bucks a month.
That's right.
Every month, from lower rates to shorter terms, even debt consolidation, their salary-based mortgage consultants can do it all, and they never charge upfront or hidden fees.
So why not learn more?
If you like what you hear, you can pre-qualify for free.
Possibly skip two mortgage payments.
You could close in as fast as 10 days.
Just call 866-721-3300.
That's 866-721-3300 or visit AmericanFinancing.net.
That's 866-721-3300 or visit American financing.net NMLS 1 8 2 3 3 4 NMLS 1 8 2 3 3 4.
to 334-NMLS-A-1.
If you thought that The Daily Wire was going to take a break from bringing you new awesome content, wrong!
financing.net 866-721-3300 to get started.
Okay guys, I have an exciting announcement today.
If you thought that The Daily Wire was going to take a break from bringing you new awesome content, wrong!
We are adding new content on like a weekly basis.
We are pumped because we've got a new film coming out just for you.
You thought that Shut In was just gonna be our film for the year.
Wrong you were, because get ready for March 10th, the premiere of our newest film, The Hyperions.
It doesn't follow that same old Hollywood prescribed formula.
It's a film that stands entirely on its own.
It is awesome and fun.
You're gonna love it.
And it is not for, it's not creepy like, okay?
It's not made, it's not a hard R. You can have your teenagers watch this film.
Check out the trailer.
Good day, Hyperion Club members.
We've come for one thing.
Our Titan Badge.
This Titan Badge can grant an individual superhuman power.
Perhaps it's time for someone else to take on the responsibility.
On my way.
She's trying to destroy me.
You you you The Hyperions is a throwback superhero meets dysfunctional family meets quirky criminals movie.
It is 100% worth the stream.
We're going to be streaming the film once on March 10th for all of YouTube to see.
After that, you need to be a member to get in on the action.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe so you don't miss any more of the growing cache of content we have to offer.
Plus, My friend Jonathan Isaac, he has a new book out.
You need to go check it out right now.
It's no secret that wokeness has infiltrated everything, including sports.
We're not the only ones who are fed up.
That's why Orlando Magic star Jonathan Isaac is publishing a book with The Daily Wire about the rise of his basketball career, his journey into faith, his strength to stand alone in the face of immense social pressure.
I mean that literally.
While the rest of the NBA was kneeling to protest supposed American racism, Jonathan Isaac was standing for America and for his faith.
This autobiographical account will give insight and inspiration to anybody Looking to take the woke out of sports?
Jonathan Isaac's Why I Stand is available for pre-order now today at Amazon Reserve.
Your copy.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Well, meanwhile, the U.S. economy is about to hit the skids.
There are just a number of forces that are militating against the upward trajectory of the United States economy.
One of those, by the way, is the continuing fostering of relationship between Russia and China.
China announced just yesterday They would not join in sanctions on Russia that have been led by the West.
So the Russia, China, Iran axis is growing stronger and stronger.
The United States is responding to that by moving to confront China on trade and industrial policy.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration is preparing to confront China on its industrial subsidies and seek ways to protect America's edge in new technologies, hardening U.S.
economic policy toward the nation's chief global rival.
That's a good thing.
We should be doing this.
We should have been doing this years ago, in fact.
The interrelationship between the Chinese economy and the American economy, it turns out, has been a boon for China and not quite such a boon for the United States.
The White House is weighing heightened scrutiny of U.S.
companies' investments in China, tighter export controls, and sensitive technologies, greater cooperation with European and Asian allies and partners on subsidies and other issues.
That approach is motivated by growing conviction within the Biden administration that Donald Trump's tariff campaign against Chinese imports did not persuade Beijing to compete fairly in international trade.
Apparently, they're going to confront Beijing's non-market practices by going to the World Trade Organization, is apparently the idea here.
The new initiative comes as efforts to build on the Phase One deal have stalled with high-level U.S.
and Chinese officials no longer in close communications on trade.
So, we are now breaking... It turns out, again, the age of American hegemony has serious costs.
The end of that has serious costs for the American public.
In other words, we now have to do things we didn't have to do before because we got weak on American foreign policy.
And so the predictable effect of that is that products are going to become a lot more expensive.
A lot of the interrelated economic relationships that have been created over the course of the last 30 years are about to fragment.
That may be necessary and it may be good.
You know what would have been better?
Is if we had never had to do any of that because we had been so strong on foreign policy that everybody was damned afraid of us.
But obviously that's no longer the case.
Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell says he's going to propose a quarter percentage point rate increase at the central bank's meeting in two weeks amid high inflation, strong economic demand and a tight labor market.
He got explicit because he was afraid that the markets were getting very, very shaky.
There was a lot of prediction that he was going to raise by half a point as opposed to a quarter point.
The Fed really has only done quarter point raises for the past 15 years or so.
Powell said on Wednesday before Russia's invasion of Ukraine last week, he expected the central bank would follow that initial rate rise with a series of increases this year.
Powell said, for now, I would say we'll proceed carefully along the lines of that plan.
We're going to avoid adding uncertainty to what is already an extraordinarily challenging and uncertain moment.
The S&P 500 rose 1.9% on Wednesday.
The reason is because it's bouncing around a little bit like a yo-yo, but not just that.
Powell creating some certainty in the market is a useful thing for the market.
However, is that going to be enough to curb inflation?
Very doubtful.
Powell effectively ended a debate in markets and among other Fed officials over whether they would lift rates from zero this month with a larger half percentage point increase.
At the same time, he laid the groundwork for the possibility of half point increases this summer, pushing back against the idea that the more traditional quarter point increases represent a speed limit for the Fed.
So he's saying just for the moment, we're going to do 0.25, 25 basis points, but a little bit later, maybe three months from now, maybe we'll jump it from 0.25 to 0.75.
Pell said his colleagues expect inflation to peak and diminish soon.
He said to the extent inflation comes in higher or is more persistently high than that, we will be prepared to move more aggressively by raising rates by a half percentage point at one or more meetings later this year.
So all of the foreign policy discombobulation combined with Joe Biden's threats against various businesses Combined with Jerome Powell raising the interest rates is likely to lead to a bit of economic stagnation right here.
We're not going to see wildly booming economic numbers this year in the way that was once forecast by all of the economic predictors.
Now the best thing that could happen, honestly, for Joe Biden and for the country is for him to lose Congress in 2022.
If he loses Congress in November, the markets are going to go back to sleep.
If he loses in 2022, the markets are going to say, okay, at the very least, we're not going to get massive crackdowns on American business in a way that Joe Biden would prefer because Congress will stop it.
He'll actually have the power to stop it.
I think the markets are already starting to price that in, which is why you're seeing the markets somewhat stable in the face of all of this chaos.
Suffice it to say, however, that the growth numbers that were forecast at the beginning of Joe Biden's administration have not been hit, and that is because of Joe Biden's incompetence on both foreign and domestic policy.
The best thing that can happen to the markets is Joe Biden failing in his policy goals.
We've had massive job increases in December, in January, in February.
Those massive job increases are because Joe Biden didn't get what he wanted.
He's taking credit for them.
But Joe Biden is simultaneously going around whining that he didn't get what he wanted.
That's not a coincidence.
When Joe Biden does not get what he wants, the American people get what they want, namely a growing and booming economy.
All righty, we've reached the end of today's show.
However, we'll be back here later with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Morales Show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Editing is by Adam Sajovic, audio is mixed by Mike Koromina, hair and makeup is by Fabiola Christina, production assistant Jessica Krand.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2022.
Joe Biden doubles down on transing the kids.
The New York Times admits the COVID vaccine isn't working very well in kids.
And the Queen beats COVID.
▲
Export Selection