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April 11, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:54
Nationalism Makes A Comeback | Ep. 1471
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France's election spits centrist President Emmanuel Macron against resurgent nationalist Marine Le Pen, Boris Johnson heads to Kiev, and two men accused of trying to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer are acquitted.
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Well, the big international news over the weekend was the first round of the French elections.
That first round of the French elections ended with two candidates set for a runoff.
One is the current president, Emmanuel Macron, who's considered sort of a centrist, sort of internationalist in his outlook, but he tends to be a little bit more laissez-faire in terms of economics, and far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
They keep saying far-right leader Marine Le Pen mainly because her dad was a Real far right leader Marine Le Pen used to be further to the right and she seems to have moved more to the center.
There was actually another candidate named Eric Zemmour who was actually outflanking her on the right in this particular election cycle.
The way that France's elections work, they have a first round of presidential elections.
If nobody breaks 50%, the top two candidates then run against one another.
And this is actually a repeat.
of the 2017 French elections in which it was indeed Macron against Marine Le Pen.
In the first round of those elections, it was very close.
There was some polling showing that in the second round it would be a lot closer. In the second round, Le Pen just got blown out by Macron. Macron ended up winning something like 66 to 33 in that second round of the elections.
The polling this time shows that in a second round election, a final round election between Macron and Le Pen, the race is a lot closer.
It looks more like 51 to 47 or 50 to 48.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Macron and Le Pen led the first round of France's presidential election according to projections, setting the stage for a closely contested runoff amid public frustration over high inflation and immigration.
Macron garnered 28.2% of the estimated vote ahead of Ms.
Le Pen with 22.9%.
The two will now face off in an April 24 rematch of that 2017 election that will test whether Macron can rekindle the coalition of disaffected socialists and conservatives that fueled his landslide victory five years ago.
Basically, everybody came together to stop Le Pen last time around, unclear whether it's going to happen that way this time around.
Sunday's vote, according to the Wall Street Journal, illustrated how France's political landscape has grown increasingly polarized since Macron took office.
Candidates for the Socialist and Conservative parties only garnered a combined 6.7% of the estimated vote, compared with 26% in the last elections.
Contenders from the far right and the far left won support for more than half of the electorate.
Make no mistake, nothing can be taken for granted.
Macron said on Sunday, the debate we will have during the next 15 days will be decisive for our country and for Europe.
People who are considered far right in France were sort of led by former TV pundit Eric Zemmour.
He won 7.3% of the estimated vote, and he called on his supporters immediately to back Le Pen, which you add his votes to her votes, and now you're looking at something close to about 30% of the vote.
Far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon, who finished third with 21.7%, Warrant his voters not to cast a single vote for Madame Le Pen.
Now, if that were the case, if he moves his votes over to Macron, Macron's already at about 50% and the election is basically over.
That is why I'm sort of looking at the political alignment here.
And I'm not really buying the media spin.
It's going to be a super close election in France, simply because if you look at Melenchon, Melenchon looks a lot more like, for example, Bernie Sanders.
And Bernie Sanders throwing his votes behind, say, a sort of Hillary Clinton type character, which is kind of what Macron is.
That's more of a natural fit than Melenchon's voters suddenly swinging over and supporting Marine Le Pen.
According to the Wall Street Journal, widespread anxiety over the cost of living and the decline of middle- and working-class France, coupled with deep anti-immigrant sentiments in many parts of the country, has helped Ms.
Le Pen rally supporters in the final weeks of the campaign.
February polls showed Le Pen garnering 16 percent of the first-round vote.
Surveys taken days ahead of Sunday's vote showed Macron leading her in the runoff by just two percentage points.
On Sunday, Ms.
Le Pen cast France as a country torn by cultural and social divisions, calling on voters from across the political spectrum to unite behind her.
She said, quote, I will put France in order.
In the final two weeks of the campaign, they're expected to center on how to fight record high inflation.
Le Pen wants to slash the taxes on fuel and other essentials.
And give businesses incentive to raise wages.
Macron has ordered a cap on electricity and natural gas prices.
So her strategy is a lot better than his because artificial caps on the price of oil and natural gas is not going to fix the problem.
He's also instituted a rebate on fuel.
He's offering checks to low-income households to help them buy essentials.
Basically, Macron looks like sort of a centrist Democrat in terms of how he has been governing.
And Le Pen looks more like a nationalist Republican.
She looks more like Trying to think of maybe a Josh Hawley type in the United States, although Hawley is a little more free market oriented.
The type contest reveals the challenges lurking for a European political establishment that has tried to turn the page on populist and nationalist movements, according to the Wall Street Journal, focusing on geopolitical challenges like COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Le Pen wants to pull France out of NATO's military command.
She also wants European Union nations to claw back powers they delegated to the EU technocrats in Brussels.
The runoff now hinges on whether voters who cast their votes for Melenchon, an anti-capitalist, are willing to back Macron, a pro-business leader who has vowed to raise France's retirement age if he wins a second term.
Macron's push to temporarily close some mosques and rein in the independence of religious organizations has alienated a lot of France's Muslim minority, which is one of Europe's largest.
So it's a little bit of a mess over in France, but what this really underscores is that in general, European countries are turning away from the internationalism that seemed to characterize the European continent over the course of the 1990s post-Cold War, and now they're moving back into a nationalist camp.
This is why you saw Brexit succeed in the United Kingdom, and it's why you are seeing Le Pen see success in France.
It's why you've also seen Viktor Orban in Hungary having a lot of success.
Nationalist leaders, leaders who look at the nation as a unit, a body politic that has a different level of fealty than, for example, some sort of international organization like the EU are seeing a lot more success.
Marine Le Pen, for her part, she's tried to moderate her image.
Of course, I mentioned her father was a very famous far-right leader in France, pretty openly anti-Semitic.
She has moved in sort of a more centrist direction, at least in the way that she's done an image makeover.
As I said in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago, Le Pen wants to remove French forces from command of NATO and aims to amend France's constitution to limit the place of immigrants in French society.
But the way that she is defining her message on the campaign trail is framing it around voter frustration with cost of living.
For months, the 53-year-old scion of Europe's most prominent far-right family has crisscrossed La France Profonde or Deep France, those are rural areas that once represented the industrial heartland of France and are now whipsawed by the currents of global trade.
As the ripple effects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine fuel record inflation, Le Pen has pledged to massively cut taxes on fuel and other essentials and give businesses incentives to raise wages.
She's also toned down her rhetoric, which was once focused on political ideology in favor of sort of talk about her personal life.
She's trying to soften her image more broadly.
That new approach helps her win 22.9% of the estimated vote in the first round of France's presidential election on Sunday.
A lot of people who are sort of uncomfortable with her have now started to see her as a more centrist candidate, largely because she was outflanked by Zemmour, who's been very clear about his feelings that in order to sort of re-establish a Bonapartite France, that you need to close the borders and you need to radically revise the definition of what it means to be French.
Zemmour is even more openly nationalistic than Le Pen is.
In 2017, of course, as I mentioned, Macron beat the heck out of Le Pen in the runoff election.
This year, polls have Macron just two percentage points up over Le Pen in the April 24th runoff.
According to Gilles Evaldi, a researcher specializing in populist movements for CNRS, France's national research organization, the far-right has never been so close to power in France.
The content of her program remains basically the same, only her style has changed.
So she no longer wants to leave the eurozone completely.
She no longer wants to leave the euro and the common currency, but she wants to replace the EU with what she calls a European alliance that would allow nations to reclaim much of the sovereignty they've delegated to technocrats in Brussels.
And she says she will call a referendum to amend France's constitution to abolish the right of citizenship for children born in France to foreign parents, give priority to French nationals over foreigners when it comes to jobs and social housing, and force refugees to apply for asylum abroad.
She also wants to ban the Muslim headscarf in all public places.
There's sort of a forcible secularism in France that has been in place for quite a while in France and is part of the French national character almost.
Meanwhile, as I mentioned, this is part of a broader reorientation towards nationalism on the world stage that is upending a lot of geopolitics post-Cold War.
In the post-Cold War era, there's this basic theory that now everyone who's going to come together is going to be a family of nations.
International institutions would gain all sorts of credibility.
And that just didn't happen.
Instead, what we have seen is a sort of retrenchment in terms of nationalism.
And a lot of folks see that as a bad thing, but it's a natural thing.
And one of the great problems that we see in national politics and international politics is this bizarre notion that all bodies politic have the same level of loyalty, fealty, and unity.
And that is just not true.
Take America, for example.
There's this broad spectrum idea that Americans tend to think of themselves as American first in the way they live their lives.
That's not really true.
You think of yourself mostly as a member of your family, and then as a member of your local community, and then as a member of your state, and then finally, as a member of the American nation writ broadly.
And hopefully, those identities don't come into conflict, but sometimes they do.
When the federal government tries to cram down rules that invade your local community, that hurt your family, or hurt your church, or hurt your state, then you tend to bop.
Because, as everyone has known for centuries, people's loyalty tends to lie at the most local level.
I mean, this is just pure Montesquieu.
The founding philosophy was built around the idea that the more local the politics, the more you have a homogeneity of interest with the people who live near you.
And that happens to be, again, true, even within the federalist system of the United States.
It's why the Constitution was designed so the federal government was going to do very few things, but the state government could do more things, and the local government could do even more things than that, and most things were done at the social level with you and your friends who live together in a community.
Now, on the international level, post-Cold War, because the world seems as though it had gotten smaller, there was this idea that the international community, we're all going to be citizens of the world, but there's no such thing as a citizen of the world.
And this is what you are seeing, whether you're talking in Ukraine, or Russia, or China, or France, or Hungary, or the United States.
People tend to think of themselves as members of nation-states.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
In the aftermath of World War II, there was this idea that nation-states were the problem.
If we had just abolished nation-states, right, and this sort of John Lennon Imagine notion, imagine there's no nations.
It's easy if you try.
If you just get rid of the borders, we'll all live together in peace.
That's not the way that human nature works.
Because again, you identify with people who tend to think like you and who share similar values.
And those people tend to gravitate in nation states.
nation states are the largest constituency to which you feel you have a belonging.
You don't feel like a member of the world.
You don't.
No one does.
And even people who say that they're world citizens, what they really mean is they feel a kinship with people who live in France or the UK.
They don't feel that they mean, they really don't feel that they have a kinship with, say, the Iranian government.
They don't feel they have a kinship with the Egyptian government or the Chinese government, you would hope.
And all of these nations have individual characteristics and pretending that they don't is frankly an act of complete foolish blindness.
And so we really should not be surprised to see the candidates who pledge fealty to international institutions are really taking it on the chin these days because one of the things that's become clear is that you can have more of an international Institutional life as a globe when there is not a single global hegemon.
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When there's one particularly all-powerful country like the United States or like the UK was at the beginning of the 20th century, then it turns out that there's a lot of nationalism that rises in response to that.
If you have a bipolar world, like say the Soviet Union versus the United States, then you can have spheres of influence.
Right now, we are turning into a multipolar world thanks to the sort of revision of American power and America retrenching back in place.
As that happens, you're going to see nation states rising because they don't want to be subjected to the predations of a broader world community that does not have its interests.
You're seeing this in Hungary.
I think there are a lot of people on the left who are like, why are so many conservatives interested in what happens in Hungary?
A lot of conservatives are looking at what's happening in Hungary and they're saying that Viktor Orban, for all of his supposed predations with regard to the press, that's pretty controversial.
Viktor Orban, at least, is looking at his nation and he's saying, my nation state takes precedence over any international priorities.
And again, not unique to Viktor Orban.
Not unique to Marine Le Pen in France.
Not unique to sort of right-wing figures.
A simple fact is that all over the globe, from left to the right, there's a rising sense of nationalism.
And again, after World War II, this was seen as bad because the idea was that German nationalism is what had led to World War II.
But the reality is that countries responded nationalistically.
The problem in World War II wasn't nationalism.
It was a malignant nationalism in Germany that sought imperial conquest.
The nationalism of Britain was directly invoked in World War II.
The idea that the British Isles stood for freedom was directly invoked by Winston Churchill, who was, in fact, a nationalist.
It was French nationalism that created the French Resistance.
So there was sort of an overshoot in terms of philosophy post-World War II where nationalism broad rip became bad.
This is sort of the Hannah Arendt view of how nationalism was invariably an evil, but that's not true.
Nationalism can be good or nationalism can be evil.
It sort of depends on what the nation state we are talking about is.
Right now, Iranian nationalism is really bad because Iranian nationalism is directed outward at conquering other states.
But Israeli nationalism in the same region is not a bad thing because it is resisting the predations of Iranian nationalism.
So it really depends on which nationalism you're talking about, which is why Viktor Orban beating a left-wing opponent in Hungary, I think shook up a lot of the members of the media.
Members of the media tend to think of themselves in peculiar ways as world citizens.
They're very cosmopolitan.
And when I say cosmopolitan, this is not code.
It means they literally live in major cities and that they hobnob with other people from major cities and people in major cities in Western societies tend to think very much the same way.
I know people on the left like to say that when you say cosmopolitan, you mean Jew.
Look at the Amica.
It's not an anti-Semitic reference here.
I mean that people in major cities tend to run the media because that's where the media are located.
CNN is located in New York.
Fox News is located in New York.
L.A.
Times, located in L.A.
It turns out major national media tend to be located in major cities.
This is true across the world.
And those people in major cities tend to hobnob with other people from major cities, and those people tend to think in ways that are more similar to each other than to people in their own country who live in rural areas, which is why Le Pen, for example, wins a huge percentage of the vote in the rural areas, and Trump wins a huge percentage of the vote in the rural areas, and the big cities tend to vote a very different way.
Well, Viktor Orban just recently in Hungary won a fourth successive term as Hungary's Prime Minister, despite the world press being very, very angry at Viktor Orban and suggesting that he was, in fact, a dictator.
He's not a dictator.
They held free elections in Hungary.
You may not like how he governs.
You may have problems with how he cracks down on the press, as I mentioned.
But Viktor Orban pretty clearly says he wants to protect his citizenry.
This is going to be the way the world works.
Just be realistic about this.
Be realistic about the fact that people identify as members of nations.
The great sort of Marxist lie in the run-up to World War I, for another historical example, was that there would be a class uprising that would prevent a world war.
If there was a world war, it would be a class-based world war.
That is not what happened.
World War I broke down along nationalistic lines.
There is something natural about the nation-state.
The nation-state, in fact, replaced even more local struggle.
I mean, if you look at a map of Europe in, say, 1300, it looks like a series of dots.
It looks like a pointillist painting because the areas of governance are so small.
Nationalism replaced that and actually made for less war.
As nationalism has grown, typically speaking, war has become more and more rare because it is harder to mobilize a broader area in favor of a war than it is to mobilize your local city-state against the neighboring local city-state, which is located just right across this particular hill.
Anyway, Orban recently won in Hungary, and this disappointed a lot of people on the left.
With nearly 86% of the vote counted, his party was on course to increase its parliamentary majority, winning 135 seats in the 199-member parliament.
The same thing has happened in Israel.
The coalition in Israel right now is on the verge of collapse, but there is no real left in Israel.
It just doesn't exist anymore.
Nationalism is a very live issue in Israel.
And by the way, again, To pretend that nationalism is a bad thing ignores the fact that it's Ukrainian nationalism that is currently resisting Russian nationalism.
There's this kind of amazing video, Boris Johnson, again, he's a UK nationalist.
Boris Johnson.
Boris Johnson, a nationalist, arrived in Ukraine to meet with Vladimir Zelensky, a nationalist, both of whom are resisting Vladimir Putin, who is a malevolent nationalist who is seeking international control.
Here's some of that video.
I mean, kind of amazing that Boris Johnson just arrived in Kiev.
And it does give the lie to the idea that the United States is the world leader on these issues.
Really, really not.
Not under Joe Biden anyway.
Meanwhile, the battle in Ukraine is heating up once again.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Ukraine and Russia poured reinforcements into eastern Ukraine this weekend, preparing for what are likely to become the war's biggest battles.
As refugees continue to flee the looming Russian assault, Russia's main objective now is to seize the parts of eastern Donbass not yet controlled by Moscow.
Unlike the first phase of the six-week-old conflict, that shift is forcing Ukraine into fighting conventional battles involving tanks, artillery, aircraft on flat, often barren terrain that allows Russia to leverage its superiority in military equipment.
Fresh Russian tank and artillery units, as well as forces withdrawn from areas around Kiev, began arriving in recent days to staging grounds for the offensive.
North of the Ukrainian city of Izium, according to footage shown on Russian military television, Ukraine 2 started moving toward Donbass combat units from areas of northern Ukraine and recovered after Russian troops retreated.
Skirmishes along the line in Donbass and nearby regions continue daily.
Russian forces are trying to push south of Izium.
The timing of a major campaign, Western and Ukrainian officials said, is up to Moscow, which could press the offensive imminently with available forces or wait a few weeks to reconstitute units that suffered losses in northern Ukraine.
For his part, Zelensky is calling for urgent assistance ahead of the new round of the conflict, warning Moscow has not given up on its aspirations to subjugate Ukraine.
He said Russia can still afford to live in illusions, gathering new armor and new troops on our soil.
That means we need even more sanctions, even more weapons, When you're working at diplomacy, there are no results.
All of this is very bureaucratic.
the weekend preaching the cause of Ukrainian resistance.
When you're working at diplomacy, there are no results.
All of this is very bureaucratic.
That's why the way I am talking to them is absolutely justifiable.
I don't have any more lives to give.
I don't have any more emotions.
I'm no longer interested in their diplomacy that leads to the destruction of my country.
A lot of countries have changed their mind about Ukraine and about our people, but I think we've paid too high a price for that.
Zelensky also spoke with the South Korean National Assembly.
He told them at least tens of thousands of people have been killed by the Russians in Mariupol, most of them civilians.
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The reason all this is important is again, a realistic view of the world is that it is a nation state centered world.
And we are seeing that in China.
And if the United States of the West refused to face up to that and strengthen our own nation in the face of other nation states that seek a rise in their own power, then we are going to be put in a really, really bad position.
Powerful nation states that are arising are going to challenge the United States for dominance.
And so the choice is whether we wish to retreat from that or whether we wish to engage.
And if we wish to engage, what that really means is strengthening our military, strengthening our economy, strengthening ourselves in terms of social solidarity.
All of these things can only be done by pursuing proper policy.
It means actually spending in smart ways on our military.
It means making sure in terms of social solidarity that Americans, in order for us to really feel as though we are bonded as Americans, we cannot feel like the federal government is going to come knock on our door and stop us from parenting our kids, for example.
It has to be a basic agreement among citizens from California and citizens from Texas and citizens from Florida that we are all part of the same nation.
That can only happen if we believe that at the top level of the nation state, we have basic agreement on basic things.
That cannot happen if there is not only no agreement, there's a belief that seizing the power of the federal government is going to allow us to cram down our own peculiar mode of viewpoint on people who live locally in different parts of the country.
You do that and you are breaking the social compact in a way that actually weakens the fabric of the United States.
what we've been seeing over the course of the last several decades from the social left.
That does have an impact.
You'll notice that not a lot of people in Florida or Texas are calling on California to live like Florida or Texas, but you're noticing a lot of people in California are insisting that the federal government be used as a club in order to beat Florida and Texas into living like they want to.
That has international ramifications, because when you weaken the fabric of the nation-state, it starts to tear apart.
The United States is a quilt.
You start pulling at the threads of the quilt, and it's going to come apart.
Meanwhile, China is accelerating its expansion of its nuclear arsenal because of a change in its assessment of the threat posed by the United States.
According to the Wall Street Journal, this is people with knowledge of the Chinese leadership's thinking.
The Chinese nuclear effort predates Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
But the U.S.' 's wariness about getting directly involved in a war there has likely reinforced Beijing's decision to put greater emphasis on developing nukes as a deterrent, some of those people say.
Again, because it is Russian nukes that have basically deterred the United States from direct involvement in Ukraine.
Chinese leaders see a stronger nuclear arsenal as a way to deter the United States from getting directly involved in a potential conflict over Taiwan.
Which of course means that we need to strengthen Taiwan's military capacity right the hell now, and we need to strengthen our naval capacity tremendously in order to make sure that we have some sort of control over the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.
Among recent developments, work has accelerated this year on more than 100 suspected missile silos in China's western, remote region that could be used to house nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching the United States.
American leaders have said the thinking behind China's nuclear advance is unclear.
Independent security analysts who study nuclear proliferation say they are also in the dark about what is driving Beijing.
Why is this a mystery?
Again, it shouldn't be a mystery.
And simple fact is that it is Russia's gigantic 6,000 warhead nuclear arsenal that has allowed Russia to continue its predations in Ukraine.
If they didn't have nuclear weapons, NATO would have stopped this thing by now.
The people close to Chinese leadership said China's increased focus on nuclear weapons is also driven by fears that Washington might seek to topple Beijing's communist government following a more hawkish turn in U.S.
policy toward China under both Trump and Biden.
American military officials and security analysts are concerned China's nuclear acceleration could mean it would be willing to make a surprise nuclear strike.
The people close to the Chinese leadership are ensuring, they keep saying, that Beijing is committed to not using nuclear weapons first, but the idea of using those nuclear weapons as a deterrent in case of a conventional war, that would not be surprising in any way, shape, or form.
Meanwhile, China's domestic crackdown is growing ever larger.
Shanghai is now in the middle of a massive lockdown.
A massive lockdown in which basically nobody has died.
They've decided to pursue COVID zero because the fact is that their vaccines really suck over in China.
Sinopharm is really a bad company and the vax that was created by the Chinese government really is kind of garbagey.
And so what they're afraid of is that The Omicron variant is still going to hit their population hard enough to take them offline.
And so you've seen videos emerging from Shanghai, where literally millions of citizens are locked in their houses, and the videos are truly dystopian.
There are people in their apartment buildings cheering, and there are drones that are going around and telling people, That they need to stay in their houses.
People screaming out their windows after a week of total lockdown.
This is what was happening over in Shanghai.
And drones have been arriving to tell people that their freedom doesn't matter.
They need to stay in their homes.
Again, the Chinese government having no compunction about the use of its own power at home in order to cudgel citizens into line.
According to Reuters, orderlies posted cried for help on social media, saying they were overwhelmed.
According to various sources, the lockdown has become a test case for the country's strict policy.
Home quarantine is not an option.
Until public outrage prompted a change, Shanghai was actually separating COVID-positive children from their parents.
From March 1st to April 9th, Chinese Financial Hub reported some 180,000 locally transmitted infections, 96% of which were asymptomatic and reported no deaths for the period.
They're still deeply afraid, however, that lots of people are going to die.
And so they've been just locking people down in forced quarantine.
You're not allowed to quarantine in your own home.
Shanghai is doubling down on quarantine policy.
They've converted schools, recently finished apartment blocks, vast exhibition halls into centers, the largest of which holds 50,000 people.
Authorities said last week they've set up over 60 such facilities.
These steps have been greeted by the public with a mixture of awe at their speed and horror over the conditions, prompting some Shanghai residents to call for home quarantine to be allowed.
Videos on Chinese social media have shown hastily converted quarantine sites including a ramshackle vacant factory where a number of camping beds were placed, a site made out of shipping containers, and a school with a poster saying blankets and hot water were not available.
So China continues to be a hellhole of a place to live.
Now all of this would again suggest that the United States needs to take measures to ensure its own safety and security.
And this would mean, you know, actually unleashing the power of the American economy.
Instead, we are going to be using the power of the United States government in order to cram down the sort of build back better vision, which would reorient the entire American economy around the visions of Joe Biden, which makes no sense since the man can't even speak English anymore.
Instead, what we are going to end up with is probably a recession.
According to the Wall Street Journal, economists see a growing risk of recession as the relentlessly strongest economy whips up inflation, likely bringing a heavy-handed response from the Federal Reserve.
Economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal this month on average put the probability of the economy being in recession sometime in the next 12 months at 28%.
That is up from 13% a year ago.
Risk of a recession is rising due to a series of supply shocks cascading throughout the economy as the Fed lifts rates to address inflation, said Joe Bruselas, the chief economist at RSM US LLP.
Economists have also slashed their forecast for growth this year.
On average, they see inflation-adjusted GDP rising 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022 from a year earlier.
That is down a full percentage point from the average forecast just six months ago.
The looming risk of a downturn alongside alarmingly high inflation, which at 7.9% in February, captures the Fed's balancing act.
It's attempting to cool the economy enough to bring down inflation, not so much that it actually creates a recession, but it seems as though the Fed is probably going to blow that chance and we'll end up in some sort of recession.
Meanwhile, Americans continue to lose trust in our government at the highest levels.
It's kind of a shocking case out of Michigan that, I mean, honestly, I've never seen anything like this on a national level.
So you remember that back during the election cycle of 2020, there was this rather shocking plot that apparently some men in Michigan, militia members, had planned to kidnap and maybe kill the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer.
Well, now it turns out that two men who were involved in this supposed plot, they've now been acquitted.
And the reason they were acquitted is it turns out that FBI agents basically almost compelled them to involve themselves in the plot.
According to the New York Times, it was one of the country's highest-profile domestic terrorism cases.
An alleged plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, eliminate her security detail, perhaps touch off a civil war.
But after a trial in which prosecutors portrayed the four defendants as threats to democracy, jurors on Friday acquitted two of the men and said they were unable to reach verdicts for the other two.
The result was a major blow to the Justice Department, which during the Biden administration has made domestic terrorism one of its top priorities.
The defendants in the Michigan trial were arrested weeks before the 2020 election.
The case was seen by some as revealing increasingly combative discourse among certain right-wing groups.
But a series of missteps during the investigation and the eventual failure to win any convictions against the men who went to trial raises questions about the ability of federal law enforcement, when it infiltrates right-wing groups, to develop convincing cases without infringing on the rights to speak freely and own weapons.
And this is one of the problems, is that very often the FBI will deploy people into the middle of these cases, and instead of the FBI just watching and observing and then bringing evidence, the FBI apparently, in this particular case, was basically whipping up the fury and encouraging people to engage in criminal activity, and then seeking to have these people arrested.
Prosecutors built their case on a trove of audio recordings and encrypted texts from 2020, in which some of the men vented about COVID-19 restrictions, spoke about political violence, and debated the best way to kidnap Whitmer from her vacation home in northern Michigan.
Yet the very existence of those recordings and text conversations underscored the defense theory of the case, that the supposed plot had actually been conceived and nudged ahead by a network of FBI agents and informants who preyed on the worst instincts of their loose-lipped targets.
The defense lawyers described the men on trial as big talkers who were never going to commit any kidnapping.
Words hurt you, words scare you.
Daniel Harris, who was acquitted of all the charges against him, had said when he took the stand in his own defense, Harris insisted he never joined any plot.
He referred derisively to an FBI informant, Dan Chappell, who had testified earlier in the trial that he feared the group's anti-government and anti-law enforcement rhetoric would escalate into violence.
Issues with the action of some FBI agents also loomed over the trial.
But little of that was explicitly discussed in front of jurors.
One FBI agent was fired last year after being charged with domestic violence.
Another agent, who supervised Chappell, tried to build a private security consulting firm based in his work in the FBI, according to a BuzzFeed News report.
The jury of six men and six women didn't reach any verdict on the charges against two of the defendants.
A judge declared a mistrial for those men and ordered them held in jail.
The others have been charged in connection with the investigation, have pled guilty before the trial to kidnapping, conspiracy, and testified against the defendants in a federal case.
But apparently the two who were hit with a mistrial are probably going to be retried.
Prosecutors kept showing jurors inflammatory social media posts and chat messages from the defendants, and they presented audio recordings from Chappelle and other informants.
One former co-defendant who pled guilty testified he hoped to set off a chain of events that prevent Joe Biden from being elected and perhaps foment a civil war.
But the prosecution's case was hampered by lack of clarity on what exactly the men were accused of plotting.
No attack ever took place.
No final date for an abduction was actually set.
The details of the alleged plan sometimes differ dramatically from prosecution witness to prosecution witness.
The FBI informant, Chappelle, said he believed the group planned to kill Whitmer, whose handling of the COVID-19 pandemic had infuriated the men.
Mr. Garbin, who earlier pled guilty, said he thought the group of men might abandon the governor in a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan.
Mr. Franks told jurors he had hoped to die in a shootout with the governor's security detail.
Joshua Blanchard, a lawyer for one of the defendants, said, quote, there was no plan to kidnap the governor.
There was no agreement between these four men.
He said the government tried to conjure up a conspiracy by using a network of informants and undercover agents, and that without a plan, the snitches that needed to make it look like there was movement toward a plan.
Hey, the reason this is such a mess for the government is that, of course, this has some implications for the January 6th defendants, because some of the case that's been made by defendants in that case is that a lot of people were basically whipped into a frenzy, not by Trump's speech per se, but by alleged FBI informants in the crowd.
And the FBI is now admitting that there were, in fact, informants in the crowd.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the DOJ has expanded its investigation into the January 6th riot and is gearing up for summer trials in some of the most serious related cases brought so far, just as some cracks in prosecutor's strategies have started to emerge.
In recent weeks, a judge issued the first full acquittal among hundreds of cases.
That was a man who said he believed that the police ushered him into the building and acquitted another man of a more serious charge that he faced.
In that case, Judge Trevor McFadden said the defendants didn't engage in the violence.
And also, there is in fact tape of police officers ushering people into the building.
Another possible complicating factor for the government.
And this is again, pretty troublesome for prosecution.
At least a half dozen Federal Bureau of Investigation informants were in the crowd at the U.S.
Capitol on January 6th as a pro-Trump mob stormed the building, according to people familiar with the matter, who say none of them appeared to have been sent there by the Bureau to engage in or encourage violence.
Defense lawyers are pressing the FBI for information about those informants.
The informants could be an issue, as prosecutors prepare for their first trial in July on sedition and other charges against members of the right-wing militia Oath Keepers, as well as a potential August trial for members of the Proud Boys.
The presence of informants could open the door for defense attorneys to argue that their clients were coerced into violence.
The FBI is not commenting on the informants.
They're citing standing practice against talking about sources.
And again, this is going to be the case the defense makes that people didn't really mean to go into the building.
They were whipped up by members of the FBI.
We'll have to see what sort of evidence emerges on that.
Certainly, if the FBI informants were doing that sort of thing, that Is pretty nasty stuff.
I mean, that that tears at the fabric of the United States.
You want criminals to actually be criminals, not people who are encouraged by federal law enforcement to get involved in the criminality jury.
Of course, you can count on her for the stupidest take on the particular on the Michigan case.
She says, of course, this is about the defendants being white is because black people are never, ever, ever acquitted of things ever.
Except for the murder conviction rate is actually lower for homicide cases, depending on race.
Joy Ann Reid says, quote, Unreal.
So in America, in the year of our Lord 2022, you can plot to kidnap a Democratic woman governor to stage a show trial and hurt her or worse, because you don't like COVID restrictions and walk as long as you're a white right wing extremist, holy jury nullification Batman.
Or actually it wasn't jury nullification.
It turns out that there were widespread reports leading up to the trial that the FBI informants had been deeply involved in the actual planning of The supposed kidnapping that was set to go down.
All of that tears at the social fabric of the United States.
Well, Joy Reid makes everything worse, but let me tell you about something that makes every single thing better.
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Alrighty, folks.
If you haven't heard of my book club, now is your chance to sign up.
Last month, we did A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
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And speaking of the social fabric coming apart, certainly when you have the FBI, which has lost the trust of the American people following its intervention in the election of 2020, and then it's it's steel dossier involvement.
And now this case in Michigan.
When major institutions are falling apart, that is never a good thing.
It's also not a good thing.
When the media continued to exacerbate those conflicts.
Amazing clip on CNN over the weekend.
There's a professor named Joshua Calla of Yale, and he was talking about the partisan coverage, skew, of various sources.
And he was asked by Brian Stelter about Fox News, because CNN perceives itself to be objective, but Fox News to be evil.
And this professor, Joshua Calla, just finishes CNN on CNN.
It was pretty amazing.
CNN engages in this partisan coverage filtering as well that we find.
For example, during this time, the Abraham Accords were signed, and these were the agreements where Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain signed a major peace agreement.
And we see that Fox News covered this really major accomplishment about 15 times more than CNN did.
So we establish both networks are really engaging in this partisan coverage filtering.
It's not about one side.
It's about the media writ large.
I think you're engaging in some both sides-ism there, Josh.
I'm gonna get Brian Stelzer to try to walk that one back.
I mean, no, that's not about both sides-ism.
It turns out that there is partisan coverage filtering.
What he means by that is that there are a couple of different ways that you can bias a story.
One is you can cover the same story in two different ways.
The other is you just don't cover the story at all.
So if you watch Fox News, you get a very different perception of big stories in America versus if you watch CNN.
If you watch CNN, they're not going to talk about the problems of critical race theory or gender orientation theory being given to small kids.
They're just going to talk about the evils of the right-wing quote-unquote don't say gay bill.
And if you watch Fox News, you're not going to get a lot about, say, Donald Trump's legal predicaments at any various point.
You're just going to get whatever each network wishes to tell you.
The solution to the media, unfortunately, for all of this is to just keep doubling down on stupid by instead of encouraging free speech and the viewing of multiple sources, which is something we do on this program.
I've told you you should listen to this program.
You should listen to Pod Save America.
And then where we intersect, that's where the facts are and everything else is opinion.
I've never heard anybody from Pots of America say anything similar, which again, demonstrates that the bias is, when it comes to willingness to allow the other side to speak, there is a pretty one-sided bias here.
Meanwhile, over the Washington Post, you have the former CEO of Reddit, Ellen Powell, writing about how Elon Musk needs to be essentially barred from controlling Twitter because he's pushing for free speech.
She says, quote, Musk has been open about his preference that Twitter do less to restrict speech that many see as hateful, abusive, or dangerous.
Given his new influence, the way he himself has used the platform bodes ill for the future.
Musk paid $20 million in fines to the SEC, stepped down as Tesla's chairman after tweeting what the SEC said was misleading information about a potential transaction to take the company private.
The settlement also required that any Musk tweets about the company's finance be reviewed by a lawyer.
On non-financial subjects, Musk often punches down in his tweets, displaying very little empathy.
He called a British caver who helped rescue trapped young Thai divers a pedo guy, beating a defamation suit over the slur, but adding to his reputation as a bully.
And in February, he tweeted and then deleted a meme comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler.
So because of all of this, because of all of this, according to Ellen Pao, probably Twitter should continue to shut down more speech.
Less speech is the answer for so many people on the left.
And this tears at the social fabric as well, because here is the thing.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, all of these outlets are going to be reliably to the left for sure.
But so long as you can redirect your attention to something that's not reliably to the left, you're going to be okay with that.
The minute you start seeing social media companies cracking down on the distribution of information, then the fabric really comes apart because you feel like you're the underground at that point.
Which is why it is bad news for Twitter that Elon Musk has now reversed his decision to join the new Twitter board.
According to Chief Executive Parag Agarwal, there was a lot of optimism, I think, on the right and in the center that Elon Musk would help to reopen a lot of these spigots that Twitter has closed.
Instead, a late Sunday announcement suggested that Musk was not going to be joining the board.
Agarwal said in a message posted to Twitter, he and the board were excited about collaborating with Musk and believed having him as a fiduciary of the company where he has to act in the best interests of the company and all our shareholders is the best path forward.
Musk's appointment was supposed to take effect on Saturday, according to the Twitter CEO, but Elon shared that same morning he will no longer be joining the board.
Agrawal did not provide a reason for Musk's decision.
I would assume the reason for Musk's decision is he felt like he didn't actually have enough control over the board, so he'd get all the blame and none of the actual change that he was seeking.
The Tesla Inc.
CEO did not respond to a request for comment late on Sunday.
Instead, he tweeted a face-with-hand-over-mouth emoji.
After Agrawal's tweet, shares of Twitter fell 0.5% in recent pre-market trading following that particular announcement.
So that is not a great shock.
Again, the only thing that was going to save Twitter was a reorientation toward more free speech.
It seems like there was too much objection internally to that actually happening.
And all of that, again, tears away at the social fabric that you need in order to solidify a country on the international stage.
I keep coming back to the international stage because that's something that if you're truly an American patriot, left, right, or center, you should agree that a more powerful America on the world stage is a useful thing.
An America unified around common principle is a useful thing.
That can only happen with more freedom at the federal level and more unity at the local level.
Instead, we are attempting to pursue unity top-down, ersatz unity at the federal level, and we are seeking less unity at the local level, and that is a recipe for disaster.
Speaking of which, our national media, again, are very involved in cramming down on these particular radical ideas from the top levels.
And you can see how radical the left has become over the course of the past few years.
Just a few years ago, my friend Dennis Prager, this is like 2019, Dennis Prager was on Bill Maher's show.
And he was talking about how radical the left had become.
And he mentioned the fact that according to the left, men can menstruate.
And he was literally laughed at.
Everybody on the panel, all of them identified as Democrats except for Dennis, laughed at him, openly mocked him for suggesting this.
Of course, Dennis was completely right.
To say that men can menstruate is a lie, and that is now, that is what is said.
Wait, wait, wait, where did that come from?
You never heard it, right?
Check it out, folks.
Check it out.
Anyone who says a man cannot menstruate is considered transphobic.
I missed this whole story.
Okay, you missed the whole story.
Okay, and everyone on panel's laughing at him.
We got Ronan Farrow over there laughing at him.
The entire left now believes that men can menstruate.
And not only that, they believe that this should be enforced to top down.
You had the federal government, Jen Psaki at the federal government, saying that states that seek to prevent the medical butchering of small children, of minors, that these states are standing in the way of their constitutional freedoms.
And the left has played this double game at a national level, particularly with regard to social policy, in which they basically say pretty openly that they wish to come for your kids, and they wish to reorient your kids away from your values.
And then the minute you call them on it, they're like, no, no, no, we would never do that.
I mean, listen, a couple of years ago, there was a gay men's choir openly singing songs about how they were coming to indoctrinate your children, because this is what tolerance is all about.
We'll convert your children.
Then we'll turn to you, giving up the fear inside.
It's screaming like you never knew.
Go and see San Francisco.
Go and turn up that disco.
You'll forget you were ever upset.
We'll convert your children And make an ally of the United States I believe that was the Gay Men's Choir of San Francisco.
We'll convert your children.
And now, there's been a lot, as I've said, there's been a lot of talk over the last few days about the terrible nature of calling people groomers.
You shouldn't call anybody a groomer because groomer has a meaning and that meaning is that you are grooming children so that you can have sex with them.
Well, there's another type of grooming that is used sort of more colloquially.
And more broadly speaking, before this became the way that the term was used in the 1970s, very specifically, the term grooming, if you groom somebody for higher office, the idea was that you were preparing them for higher office.
And if you groom somebody politically, what this meant is that you were changing their mind politically in order to use them as a tool on behalf of your political agenda.
What the left has been engaged in with regard to children is, in fact, social grooming, not sexual grooming.
I'm not suggesting that people on the left who are trying to indoctrinate children in these lifestyles and ways of thinking are attempting to have sex with the kids.
This isn't about pedophilia, this is about converting children to a way of thinking and perverting their minds and confusing them so that you can feel better about yourself, which is why you have seen such a massive spike in the number of kids who are identifying as LGBTQ, happening over the course of the last 5-10 years.
We have not hit an evolutionary bottleneck here.
What you are seeing is social contagion, and you are seeing an incentive structure that encourages kids to get involved in these ways of thinking.
Because it earns them glory and their parents glory because their parents are treated as just tremendous examples of tolerance and excellent parenting if you reinforce the idea that your little boy is a girl.
This is why it should no longer be a shock to see so many teachers of small children who are out there on TikTok openly saying that they wish to quote-unquote convert your children.
For example, this first grade teacher at a Boston charter school explaining that this is innate tape to kindergartners through second graders.
That boys can be girls and girls can be boys.
This person is a quote unquote trans man, which means a biological woman.
I'm a man.
But when I was a baby, the doctors told my parents I was a girl.
And so my parents gave me a name that girls typically have and bought me clothes that girls typically wear.
And until I was 18 years old, everyone thought I was a girl.
And this was super, super uncomfortable for me because I knew that wasn't right.
Um, the way I like to describe it is like wearing a super itchy sweater.
Um, the longer you wear it, the itchier it gets, and the only way to make the itching stop is to have everyone see and know the person that you really are.
This is a person who is just telling lies about biology and society to very, very small children.
This sort of stuff is all over social media.
Here's another quote-unquote trans non-binary elementary teacher saying that three-year-olds should be able to learn about gender identity.
Three-year-olds.
Kids as young as 3 and 4 are actually aware of their gender identity, even if they don't have the language for it.
They're also very aware of who they like and who they don't like.
They're very much ready for these topics and are way more accepting than adults when it comes to discussing these topics.
Okay, it's that last point that matters, okay?
Because for this person, the idea is if you indoctrinate three and four-year-olds, then those three and four-year-olds will be nicer to you.
That's what all of this is about.
Those three and four-year-olds won't look at you like you've done something strange in dressing up as a member of the opposite gender and saying that you're a member of the opposite gender.
Instead, those kids will become your allies.
As that gay men's choir sang, we'll make allies of you guys, right?
That's the real idea here.
Now, if you point this out in any way, shape, or form, this makes you bad.
All this tears at the social fabric of the country, of course.
So you have Abigail Disney, who has never created a useful thing in her entire life.
She is an heir.
She's an heiress.
That's all.
And Abigail Disney has an entire piece in the Washington Post.
Titled, If my grandfather's company doesn't stand for love, what's it for?
Well, I was under the impression that it was for creating magical experiences for children that didn't sexualize the kids.
That's what I was under.
I mean, I was under that impression because I was a consumer of Disney.
My kids were consumers of Disney.
I don't feel like this is a very difficult one.
It was literally to entertain my kids in magical ways that did not undermine the values I was trying to teach them.
That was what Disney was for.
But according to Abigail Disney, the goal of Disney is to indoctrinate your kids.
The Walt Disney Company's slow and bungled reaction to a new Florida law ostensibly about education, better known as the Don't Say Gay Bill, no it isn't, has left the company my grandfather co-created criticized by all sides, she writes.
To find its way, Disney's to muster the courage to weather the momentary outrage of people who will not be satisfied until they have erased an entire class of human beings.
Because if this brand does not stand for love, what on earth is it for?
Love for whom?
Love for kids?
Not about love for kids.
It's about you indoctrinating kids in your particular belief system.
Is it love for anybody who disagrees with you?
Obviously not.
Because you wish for all of those people to be thrown over the side of the boat.
All those people don't matter.
I mean, you're literally supporting a bill that is about the indoctrination of small kids into your perverse view of how the world ought to work.
But you got Abigail Disney on CNN being treated as though she's a source on this because she, by the way, I have to note that the left's view of inherited wealth wildly shifts based on who has inherited the wealth. If you are Mackenzie Scott, if you're Jeff Bezos' ex-wife, and you're giving $100 million to Planned Parenthood, then the fact that you inherited a bunch of wealth from your husband in a divorce proceeding.
That means that you're good.
And for Abigail Disney, who's been a lifelong useless person so far as I can tell, but you inherited a bunch of money from the Walt Disney family.
And now you're out there promoting social leftism.
You're on Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter lecturing about how people ought to use their wealth.
This is absurd.
The thing that Disney stands for more than anything in every film and especially in the animation, whether it's a gay character or not, is love and acceptance and family and joy.
And so they're trying to inject something into what Disney does that has nothing to do with what Disney does.
Oh, don't you see?
Their viewpoint on the world is love and joy and happiness and light.
And yours is darkness and evil and cruelty.
But don't you dare say groomer.
Don't say groomer.
In fact, Pete Buttigieg will go on national television, the secretary of transportation.
Of transportation.
If I wasn't aware, was the secretary of health and human services.
Secretary of Transportation is on The View with the great luminaries over at The View.
Again, combined wattage over there is less than a 30-watt light bulb.
And Pete Buttigieg agrees with the panel that if you don't indoctrinate small kids into trans ideology, you are literally going to kill children.
You're going to kill them.
So, your opponents can accuse you of wanting to murder children by not allowing for them to be indoctrinated in left-wing social theory and or hormonally transitioned and or socially transitioned and or surgically transitioned.
That will kill the kids if you prevent that sort of stuff.
But if you say that they are politically grooming kids, if you say that they are grooming kids ideologically, So they can create little allies and place those kids in opposition to their parents.
This means that you're bad and how dare you use that sort of language.
Here's the you kill kids routine from Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, who should go back on paternity leave where he was more useful.
Talking about attacks on LGBTQ+, your husband, Chasten, is a teacher.
And he's been a vocal critic of what's going on in my state of Florida with the so-called don't-say-gay law now, which he says will kill kids.
Do you agree?
Yeah, he's right.
And I think every law ought to be judged for the effect it's going to have on real people in real life.
Oh, it's gonna kill kids.
If we don't indoctrinate kindergartners in sexual orientation, we're going to murder the kids.
But how dare you say groomer?
If you say groomer, you're a very bad person.
How dare you?
How dare you?
Okay, I don't buy any of this crap.
I don't buy any of it.
And if you're talking about weakening the social fabric that binds us, this would be it.
You're literally taking the basis of all human procreation, the sexual dichotomy between male and female, and you are throwing it overboard in favor of a top-down cultural and governmental cram-down.
And then you wonder why it feels like the nation is coming apart?
It's because you're tearing the nation apart.
You can't create an ersatz social solidarity through cultural and top-down governmental cram-down.
You can't do that.
That's precisely what the left is seeking to do.
And the consequences are going to be dire, not only nationally, but internationally as well for the United States.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Molls show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Biden babbles about his new Supreme Court Justice.
Pete Buttigieg says it's murder not to trans the kids.
And California Democrats push for a fourth trimester abortion.
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