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May 20, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:36
Joe Biden’s Stagflation Cannot Be Escaped | Ep. 1499
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The economy stumbles towards stagflation as the Biden White House doubles down on stupid.
Another COVID wave puts blue states on edge.
And the media finally noticed Joe Biden was kind of lying about Hunter Biden and China.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S.
stocks and bond yields fell, with the S&P 500 flirting with a bear market and a continuing sell-off driven by investor fears that the economy could be pitched into a recession.
The major indices dipped early in Thursday's session, a day after tumbling 4% before recovering ground.
They ultimately finished lower, with all three on track for weekly losses of at least 2.9%.
Concerns about consumer spending, which helped lift the market out of the pandemic lows, have weighed on stocks and bond yields as well.
Bond yields, The Nasdaq Composite Index entered bear market territory early this year.
It retreated 29.66 points, or 0.3%.
Investors are buying government bonds perceived as a haven asset.
for investment given the fact that there really is no great place to put your cash at this point.
The NASDAQ composite index entered bear market territory early this year.
It retreated 29.66 points or 0.3%.
Investors are buying government bonds perceived as a haven asset.
The yield on the 10-year treasury notes fell to 2.854% from 2.884% on Wednesday, losing ground for seven of the past nine trading days.
As I say, bond yields and prices tend to move in opposite directions.
In economic news, the Labor Department says new applications for unemployment benefits rose for the third week in a row.
Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, remain historically low.
Separately, U.S.
home prices reached a high in April, according to Fresh Data.
But The number of sales is falling, so it looks as though we're about to experience a real problem in the real estate markets as well, which isn't a great shock.
Again, the prices are so high in every other area of American life that you just don't have enough money left over to pay for the inflated real estate prices that we are seeing right now.
Meanwhile...
Apparently, we are now on the verge of another subprime mortgage crisis.
According to the Wall Street Journal, consumers with low credit scores are falling behind on payments for car loans, personal loans, and credit cards, a sign that the healthiest consumer lending environment on record in the U.S.
is coming to an end.
Who could have predicted that when you make credit extraordinarily loose, that when you give a bunch of people who can't pay back their mortgages, mortgages, In the hopes that the market will continue to boost prices beyond what the mortgage is actually worth, and therefore the mortgages won't flip upside down.
Who could have predicted that this sort of thing would have happened?
I mean, it's not like this just happened in 2007-2008, well within living memory of all human adults.
We're going to do the same thing again.
The share of subprime credit cards and personal loans that are at least 60 days late is rising faster than normal, according to credit reporting from Equifax.
In March, those delinquencies rose month over month for the eighth time in a row, nearing their pre-pandemic levels.
Rising delinquencies were inevitable following their decline during the pandemic, many lenders and analysts said.
Even so, the increase is getting attention from investors, partly because the Federal Reserve is about to Jack up the interest rates, which means you're going to see a lot more people defaulting on their mortgages.
And that means that the prices of real estate are going to go down, which is going to flip even more people upside down on the mortgages that they have.
So you could be watching the bursting of a real estate bubble here as well.
Delinquencies on subprime car loans and leases hit an all-time high in February based on Equifax's tracking that goes all the way back to 2007.
Many people, including those with less than perfect credit, paid off debts, built up savings during the pandemic.
The government's response, including stimulus payments and child tax credits, boosted financial health.
But now many of those benefits have run out.
Subprime borrowers, who sometimes have lower incomes or less savings, are being hit hard.
Inflation is also forcing many households to choose between paying for essentials and paying those monthly loans.
Wells Fargo Chief Executive Charlie Scharf said Tuesday, higher prices for food and gas will constrain U.S.
households.
He said, we're still in the best credit environment we've ever seen in our lives.
There will be deterioration in people's ability to pay.
So we could be looking at the beginning of a serious problem in the mortgage market as well.
How bad are things getting?
Well, people are now finally unretiring.
Well, one of the stupidities of the American job market is that we assume that people are going to retire and should retire at the age of 65.
When we made the national retirement age 65, when social security benefits kicked in at the age of 65, the average life expectancy in the United States was 63, which meant that you're really old.
65 was old at the time.
Well, now 65 is actually really, really young.
You can expect, if you're born today, you can expect that you will live to at least 80 years of age.
And that means 15 years in which you ain't getting paid to do a job.
And for the vast majority of people, I mean, right now, the president of the United States is 80 years old.
I mean, by this logic, he should have retired 25 full years ago if you're talking about 55 years old.
The reality is that 65 is the new 55 and 55 is the new 45.
Which makes sense, since we treat adults like children in this country.
But instead, we have basically said to 65-year-olds, no, you have to be forced out of the job market.
Well, now, because it turns out that inflation eats away at fixed incomes, things like Social Security, what that means is that people are going back into the job market after all, which maybe is a good thing, but it's not a good thing for the people who have to do it.
According to the New York Times, When Kim Williams and millions of other older Americans lost their jobs early in the COVID pandemic, economists wondered how many would ever work again.
Ms.
Williams, now 62, wondered too, especially when she struggled for months to find work.
But in January, she started a new job at a AAA near her home in Waterbury, Connecticut.
I'm too young to retire, so I had to go back, she said.
Whether by choice or financial necessity, millions of older Americans have made the same move in recent months.
Nearly 64% of adults between the age of 55 and 64 were working in April, essentially the same rate as in February 2020.
That's a more complete recovery than among most younger age groups.
So the older people being smarter than the younger people are like, maybe I should go back to work.
Meanwhile, you have people in other age brackets really lagging in terms of where they were As far as labor force participation rate.
So, for example, if you take the group 20 to 24, that group is still lagging about 5% below where it was before the pandemic in terms of labor force participation.
A bunch of people are basically just sitting out the economy right now thinking everybody's going to continue paying their bills.
Those are the people who are going to come up short when it comes time to pay for their mortgage or when it comes time to pay for that car.
Those are the people who are going to be defaulting.
The rapid rebound has surprised many economists who thought fear of the virus would contribute to a wave of early retirements, but there is increasing evidence that early retirement narratives were overblown.
The bottom line is that older workers have gone back to work, said Alicia Minnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
So, maybe that's good in terms of bringing down the wages, because if you have a broader supply of labor, this does bring down the wages.
But again, for a lot of people who are on fixed income, inflation is eating away at everything, and they are suffering, and they are feeling it.
Which is, of course, why there's a new CNN poll showing that 86% of people are at least somewhat scared of how things are going in the United States.
Here was CNN reporting that yesterday.
65% of Americans in our brand new CNN poll tonight say they are concerned about how things are going in the U.S.
Only 4% excited, 10% optimistic, even 1 in 5 say that they are scared.
Okay, so those are really, really bad numbers.
I mean, those are terrible numbers.
You're talking about, excited or optimistic, 14% of Americans.
Going into a midterm election cycle for Democrats, that's really, really bad.
It's particularly bad because we are now no longer just in an inflationary cycle.
So the Biden administration, they kept saying, you know what, inflation is really, you're looking at the wrong side of the coin.
Inflation, the other side of that coin is heavy consumer demand.
And heavy consumer demand means people are doing great.
Because after all, they're out there buying things.
And if you're buying things, you're buying things because you have the money to buy things.
And this means things are going Well, if you have a hot economy and inflation working in tandem, then it's not great, but it's not the end of the world.
When you have stagflation, now you start to look at the end of the world.
When you have economic stagnation and inflation, the prices are prices people cannot pay, and also nobody's buying anything.
That's like the worst of all possible worlds.
This is what happened during the Carter administration and the first couple of years of the Reagan administration before Paul Volcker jacked up the interest rates to like 20%.
So Mohamed El-Erian, who is the head of Allianz and who is an excellent economic commentator, Yeah, we've had him on the program before.
He really knows his stuff.
He's written very critically of how basically every major government in the world has delegated all financial responsibility to their central banks.
They basically told their central banks, you're in charge of unemployment and you're in charge of the inflation rate.
And they've given them too much to do.
They've used them as the solution of first resort as opposed to the solution of last resort.
And that means when things get ugly, there's not all that much that central banks can do.
And central banks aren't always right.
They mess up a lot.
Mohamed El-Erian, he said yesterday, well, you know, stagflation, it's unavoidable.
He used the word unavoidable.
It's now coming.
We have inflation and now we're going to get economic stagnation.
That is like the worst possible scenario for America.
It's the worst possible scenario for the party in charge of the country right now.
What is unavoidable is stagflation.
And we're seeing growth coming down, and we're seeing inflation remaining high.
And the Fed is finally catching up to developments on the ground, but it still has some way to go.
Hey, Mohamed El-Erian, very, very critical of the Fed's response in all of this, basically saying they overshot the mark and they've been slow off the ball every single time.
Remember, Jerome Powell originally said inflation was going to be transitory.
Then he was like, well, maybe it's not so transitory.
Then it was, there will definitely not be a recession.
Then it was, well, it's going to be kind of hard to avoid a recession.
Maybe he's just really bad at his job.
According to many, many investment fund managers, like 77% of them, They see an economic storm of slowing growth and high inflation taking hold over the course of the next year, according to Yahoo Finance and Fortune magazine.
Top economists and money managers worldwide are warning that rising consumer prices and falling economic growth are combining to form a deadly recipe for the global economy, stagflation.
Some 77% of investment fund managers say they see below-trend growth and above-trend inflation, that would be stagflation, as the most likely outcome for the global economy over the next year, according to a May survey from the Bank of America Global Research.
That is the highest percentage seen since August of 2008, when the economy was pretty terrible.
Still, despite these gloomy predictions about stagflation, most of the fund managers say that they believe we are past the worst spike in inflation.
But being past the worst spike in inflation doesn't mean that inflation is going to be in good shape anytime soon.
Last month, the inflation was 8.3%.
The month before that, it was 8.5% on an annualized basis.
That just means that it's going up slower than it was.
It doesn't mean that everything is going back to something resembling normal.
And for all the investors out there, the question is, where do you put your money?
I mean, really, where do you put your money?
Bitcoin has taken it on the chin.
The dollar seems to be maybe the best bet at this point simply because they're raising the interest rates.
So people are buying into bonds and securities.
They're moving out of the stock market.
There's talk of a possible 10-year slowdown in stock market growth.
All of this is horrible news.
And it's bad news generated by bipartisan spending policies and an idiotic assessment by the Biden administration that the way that you get out of an inflationary spiral is apparently to punish businesses.
That the best way that you can actually get out of an inflationary spiral is to deliberately seek stagnation.
This is crazy.
If you're going to get out of an inflationary spiral, what you have to do is jack up the interest rates, but free businesses at the same time, because that leads them to believe that their economic fundamentals are still sound.
That if they do things right, if they run a tight ship, they will still not only survive, but thrive and get to keep the benefits of their own labors.
But if you have an inflationary cycle combined with a bunch of bad regulation and high taxation, who in their right mind is going to invest into that market?
Who?
And yet this is exactly what the Biden administration is openly pursuing at this point.
So for example, you have the National Economic Council Director for the Biden administration openly saying that they want to raise taxes to cut inflation.
So your solution is that you're going to disincentivize businesses from investing?
This is your plan?
I mean, that's actively seeking stagflight.
Because here's the thing.
Raising taxes is not going to markedly bring down inflation.
The inflation rates are going to be markedly brought down by the increase in interest rates from the Federal Reserve.
At the margins, you might see a minor decrease in inflation, thanks to raising the taxation on corporations, simply because they won't be able to afford to pay their workers, and so the wages are going to go down a little bit.
So it'll have a little bit of a marginal effect on the wage price spiral.
Because if wages go down, prices will have to go down in order to meet the dropping wages.
But how is that?
So your plan to get out of this is to make the American worker feel the pain of losing their job, Via you going after their boss?
I guess, I mean, I sort of understand the logic if you're the Democrats.
Because if you're the Democrats, I guess the idea is somebody's going to have to be the bad guy here.
Let's make it your employer.
It can either be us or it can be your employer.
Now, a normal sort of honest economic take here would be, it's us, right?
We're going to have to raise the inflation rate.
We blew it.
Inflation rate going up.
We're going to get this sucker ironed out and then it'll all be good.
And they still have time to do this.
They do.
Remember.
That in 1981, when Paul Volcker began raising the interest rates, by 1982, Ronald Reagan had a pretty bad off-year election.
By 1984, the guy was winning 49 states.
So it is definitely possible to say to the American public, we're about to go through a rough time.
There's something we have to do to get things back looking good again.
We have plenty of room to ramp up the interest rates without completely sinking the economy, but you're going to have to bear with us and there will be some pain.
You could do that, but they can't do that, because Joe Biden and the Democrats have a pathological aversion to taking blame for anything they themselves do.
So instead, what they plan to do is raise taxes, punish corporations, force the corporations to fire people, and that will somehow, in a backdoor fashion, bring down wages, which will eventually bring down prices.
That's pretty gross, it really is.
So here is the head of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese, talking about how the raising taxes is going to somehow solve this problem.
If we can continue that deficit reduction, then we will continue from a fiscal policy perspective to reduce price pressures in the economy.
And one of the most sensible ways to reduce the deficit right now is to enact corporate tax reform that would level the playing field, that would reduce the incentives for corporations to drive profits and production overseas, and would increase revenue to the federal government.
So they keep going over and over to this idea.
First of all, even the outcome of his own policies don't make sense.
He's talking about how basically corporations are just being greedy and that's what's driving inflation.
That's not true.
That is not true.
Did corporations suddenly become radically greedy?
According to Democrats, they've been greedy the whole time.
So what magically changed that made them greedy all of a sudden?
Also, when he says at the very end of that clip that this is going to drive more revenues to the government, revenues to the federal government are at an all-time high right now.
That is not the problem.
We are taking in more money at the federal government level than any time in American history right now.
Bar none.
Not close.
That is not the problem.
The problem is, whatever we take in, in terms of the federal government, we then blow out twice as much.
That's the problem.
The spending side is the problem.
But they refuse to see that because, of course, it cuts directly against all of their economic preferences.
Already coming up, the Democrats have to find somebody to blame, so they've already tried to blame corporations.
Who else are they going to blame?
You guessed it.
Vladimir Putin.
We'll get to that in just a moment.
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I think the price increases that we've seen in energy markets, we know why that is happening, and it's because Putin invaded Ukraine.
So who else are they going to blame?
They're blaming corporations.
They're also, of course, going to blame Vladimir Putin.
Here's Brian Deese again.
I think the price increases that we've seen in energy markets, we know why that is happening.
And it's because Putin invaded Ukraine.
The war has taken Russian supply of product, but also Russian refinery capacity off of the market.
And that has put upward pressure on price.
OK, so again, this is this is the way that they're going to get out of this, just blaming It isn't going to work.
If Americans are disquieted about the economy and your plans are, let us raise taxes and yell at corporations and talk about Vladimir Putin, that is not going to do it.
It's also not going to do it when you have no solutions to any of the problems that your own FDA created.
When all of your regulatory agencies that work for you are so bad at their job that you end up with a serious baby formula shortage.
And then you've got the White House legit telling people that the solution to this problem is to call your doctor to get free samples of baby formula.
When all of this could have been handled, right?
If you're going to use the FDA to shut down domestic production of this sort of stuff, at the very least, you need to relieve a lot of the regulations on bringing in foreign supply of baby formula, but they didn't do that.
So instead, the White House has now put out a tweet.
It says, guidance to follow if you're having trouble finding infant formula.
Don't water down formula or try to make formula at home.
Instead, call your OBGYN or pediatrician to see if they have in-office samples.
So, great, that is what we have now been relegated to.
I wonder why people are feeling really, really uncomfortable with the way this administration is addressing economic problems.
The good news is that we have deployed the President of the United States, Jill Biden, to Central and South America to talk about the United States economy.
I call her the President of the United States because Joe Biden clearly is not.
We may have an Edith Wilson situation on our hands, where basically Woodrow became a meat puppet and Edith was standing behind him, moving his face like, And like weird sounds would come out and Edith would just basically define the policy.
We may be almost there with Joe Biden and Joe Biden at this point.
So Joe Biden was talking about how the real problem in America is income inequality and inequity.
And she was saying this is what matters to people in Ecuador.
I'm sorry, could you be any more disconnected from the American people at this point?
Or the people of Ecuador, by the way.
Are the people in Ecuador like, man, that income inequality in the United States really sucks.
Or is everyone in Ecuador trying to get into the United States to start at the bottom rung of the ladder?
What in the world?
Here is the greatest doctor in America, outside, of course, of Dr. J. Here's Dr. Jill Biden.
What does inequality in the United States matter to young people right here in Quito?
But they do matter.
Injustice and corruption, poverty and pollution, disease and despair, they aren't contained by any borders.
If we learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, From these last few years of sickness and sorrow, it's how one deadly virus can move through the world.
Um, what?
You just did, like, what?
Um, and also, what?
If we learned something from COVID, what we actually learned is that all of our elites are morons telling you that they can control your life top-down and wreck everything.
All right, coming up.
So, the experts that aren't experts, they're back.
And they have things to say.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Again, the experts know, so we should listen always and forever to the experts.
Speaking of which, they're trotting back out some of your old favorites.
Rochelle Walensky still has not gone away.
Somehow this woman has retained her job.
It's amazing.
Government employment is the closest thing there is to everlasting life.
You will be there forever.
Beyond death.
We'll just wheel you in there.
Joe Biden is good proof of this.
Government employment means that being animate is no longer a requirement of the job.
Rochelle Walensky, who has failed on every score, she says that as we see an uptick in the number of COVID cases across the country, maybe it's time to put back on the mask.
Oh, happiness.
In areas where community levels are high, everyone should be using prevention measures and wearing a mask in public indoor settings.
In areas with medium COVID-19 community levels in yellow, individuals should consider taking prevention measures based on their own risk, like avoiding crowds, wearing a mask, increasing their testing, especially before gathering with others indoors.
And in any COVID-19 community levels, individuals may always choose to wear a mask to protect themselves from infection.
The experts, this is why you should listen to the experts, because they're so experts when they're doing their experting.
Speaking of experts, we still have the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, saying the same thing.
Why not wear masks?
I mean, despite the fact that there's like no data on masks being preventative of Omicron.
Like, despite that.
Why not do it?
I mean, just for the funsies of it.
It was so much fun.
It was so good.
I mean, like, it obviously prevented Omicron from hitting everyone, including the already- Oh, it didn't.
Oh, none of that worked at all.
But we should do it anyway, because after all, it's like, it's like a facial symbol that you listen to the regime.
So why not?
Here's the Surgeon General.
Masks still remain an important tool that we can use to reduce spread.
And reducing spread is still important because we don't want people to get infected, even if they don't end up in the hospital or die.
That's the most important thing, obviously, is to save your life, keep you out of the hospital.
But we know people can get long COVID.
We know that they can spread it to people who are vulnerable.
So the masks are helpful.
If you are in a region of the country that is in the yellow or orange, I would strongly recommend you consider wearing a mask, especially if you're at high risk or around people who are.
Why are people in such a bad mood about this administration?
I don't understand.
Why are people in such a bad mood generally?
Well, the good news is they still have Joe Biden.
And as we know, Joe Biden is as honest as the day is long.
Widely beloved, genial old man who just reminds you of your of your uncle who would creepily rub your shoulders while muzzling your ear.
He just he's the best, right?
I mean, he's personally popular, at least he and he's he's mostly popular just because of how honest he is.
Well, I mean, that, oops.
It now turns out that, remember that time that he said that his son Hunter didn't take a bunch of money from the Chinese, like in open debate?
In 2020, he said that, like to the entire American public.
This is October 2020.
My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, uh, what are you talking about?
China.
I have not had, the only guy made money from China is this guy.
He's the only one.
Nobody else has made money from China.
Yeah, not true.
That was a lie.
Because he's a liar.
So that's too bad.
According to the New York Post today, Hunter Biden and a company he ran raked in around $11 million from his controversial business dealings while his dad served as VP and shortly thereafter, according to new scrutiny of the first son.
An NBC News report found that President Biden's scandal-scarred son burned through cash at a rate of more than $200,000 a month.
From October 2017 through February 2018, spending it on luxury hotel rooms, payments on a Porsche, and dental work, as well as making unexplained bank withdrawals.
That's a lot of dental work.
You know when you get a grill lick?
What exactly was that about?
The eye-popping figures emerged from an analysis of information stored on the first son's laptop.
Which of course the entire media pretended was Russian propaganda.
And documents released by Senate Republicans.
His river of income flowed from 2013 through 2018 as a result of ties to a Ukrainian natural gas company suspected of bribery and a since vanished Chinese tycoon accused of bribery and fraud as well.
Former White House Chief Ethics Lawyer Richard Painter told the Post, This is an enormous amount of money for Hunter Biden, whom I don't believe is an experienced corporate transactional attorney.
Yeah, you think?
So you still have the Hunter Biden stuff that is sort of hovering around Joe.
So you can see why Joe Biden and the Democrats are in real trouble.
And so once again, as always, they're swiveling.
I keep saying this because it's true.
They're swiveling to abortion.
They do not seem to understand how out of touch they are on the issue of abortion.
It really is amazing to listen to them talk about abortion as though this is what is going to save them.
So Nancy Pelosi is now trying to recast abortion as a kitchen table issue, which is Weird imagery, because really, you shouldn't perform abortions on kitchen tables, just generally.
It's not sanitary.
But here's Nancy Pelosi explaining that abortion is a kitchen table issue, which is a way of saying, let's not talk about the economy.
Let's not talk about COVID.
Let's not talk about all of our failures.
Instead, let's talk about why you should be able to kill babies.
This is a kitchen table issue.
They want to know what we're doing about their kitchen table issues.
Food, education, prescription drugs.
You want to talk about prescription drugs?
Only 12 of them voted with us to make insulin cheaper.
So our democracy on the ballot, freedom that springs from our democracy on the ballot.
A woman's right to choose is on the ballot, and that is a kitchen table issue.
A woman, abortion's a kitchen table issue.
Like if you could have an empty kitchen table with no kids there.
Gotta admire the hand motions of Nancy Pelosi here.
They're getting more and more bizarre and obscure.
She started off with like a full-on Vulcan mind meld here, right?
She started off with this one, like up here.
And then she went to this one.
Which I don't even know that it's like, like that.
She went for the loser sign.
And then finally, she went to the one finger.
So she went all the way from Spock to one finger.
There's solid stuff there from Nancy Pelosi explaining abortion is a kitchen table issue.
Meanwhile, they've trotted out their greatest spokesperson, Kamala Harris, the most brilliant orator of our time.
She's like Demosthenes or Cicero.
I mean, when the history of this age is written.
People will wonder, they will just stare agape at the video evidence that we ever experienced in order quite along the lines of the utterly sincere, totally articulate, unbelievably glib Kamala Harris.
She's just incredible at this.
So she decided that it was time to visit some abortion providers because these are the nicest people in the world.
It's amazing.
All Democrats had to do when they came into office in January 2021 was not be totally bat s*** crazy.
And they couldn't do it.
It was just not possible for them.
So instead, they decided to just be as crazy as they wanted to be.
So here is Kamala Harris.
She was, again, she's hanging out with abortion providers, which is a political winner.
I know that.
You know, when I want to be popular with my friends, I head on over to an abortion provider and I just hang out with the people who chop up unborn children all day.
It's good times.
Kamala Harris, she says, the problem with abortion law, as promoted by the right, is that if we end Roe, it will stop self-determination.
It will end women's self-determination.
Here we go.
It would be a direct assault on the fundamental right to self-determination.
To live and love without interference from the government.
At its core, this is about our future as a nation.
About whether we live in a country where the government can interfere in personal decisions.
Okay, the lack of self-awareness here is absolutely astonishing.
It's astonishing.
I just want to take a moment to go through the idiotic cream of wheat nonsense that you just spewed right there.
Quote, it would be a direct assault on the fundamental right to self-determination.
I...
You know what's a fundamental right to self-determination?
You know what that usually involves?
It involves not having your skull caved in and your brain sucked into a sink.
Like, generally, if I had to put, like, the fundamental right to self-determination, like, the very, very first step, it's not having your brain sucked into a sink.
Like, I know.
I'm demanding this way.
But if I were thinking, like, fundamental rights to self-determination would be somebody not killing me, right?
I would start from there.
Okay, then she says, to live and love without interference from the government.
To live?
To live?
Hmm?
At its core, this is about our future as a nation.
About whether we live in a country where the government can interfere in personal decisions.
Yeah, as Kamala Harris is very concerned about the government interfering in personal decisions, the Democrats hate when the government interferes in your life.
They hate it.
Democrats are known for being unbelievably hands-off when it comes to how you operate economically, in terms of your family, in terms of your marriage, in terms of everything.
They're really hands-off people.
They're basically libertarians, Democrats.
The lack of connection, again, the lack of connection to reality here is just amazing stuff.
Then, Kamala Harris has to do what the Democrats have been doing.
So they think, okay, we won't talk about the economy, we'll talk about abortion.
And they start talking about abortion about halfway through the sentence, they realize that what they're talking about is the sometimes gruesome, always deadly act of killing an unborn baby in the womb.
And then they immediately switched to, OK, we can't talk quite about that.
So what if we talk about contraception?
So let's pretend that that for some reason, Republicans want to, you know, like ban the sale of condoms or something.
Let's just do that.
So here's Kamala Harris.
The right to privacy that forms the basis of Roe is the same right to privacy that protects the right to use contraception and the right to marry the person you love, including a person of the same sex.
Overturning Roe opens the door to restricting those rights.
Okay, so, again, they're now going to try to broaden out, they're going to try to redirect, even from abortion.
It's not even about abortion now.
Now it's about, they're coming after same-sex marriage and condoms.
Okay, good luck with this argument.
Again, they have to keep swiveling from their actual abortion argument, because their actual abortion argument is really, really ugly.
Also, they're trying to misdirect from the fact that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, everyone knows that if there's violence, it's coming from the left.
So, CBS Morning News actually attempted, I kid you not, Uh-huh.
to suggest that if there is violence in the aftermath of a Roe vs. Wade striking down by the Supreme Court, that it could come from either side.
Sure.
Uh-huh.
Sure.
Here we go.
The Department of Homeland Security is mourning about an increased threat of extremist violence after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion striking down the constitutional right to an abortion.
The Associated Press obtained a memo to local government agencies.
It says that violence could come from either side of the abortion issue or from other types of extremists seeking to exploit tensions.
Either side.
Either side.
Yeah, that's probable.
That'd make perfect sense if all the pro-lifers just started rioting after they got exactly what they want.
That's normally what people do.
Well, I mean, I shouldn't say that because sometimes the L.A.
Lakers win the NBA championship and then there are riots in L.A.
But most of the time, when you get what you want, you don't then go and riot about it.
Typically, happy riots aren't the most common type of riots.
Politically happy riots.
Have you seen a politically happy riot?
Have you seen a bunch of people where they get exactly what they want?
Yes, we got our tax cut.
Let's go burn a car.
I've never seen anything remotely like that.
So I'm not sure what exactly they're talking about, except they have to try and scare people.
Well, either that, or they have to start cracking down on the dissemination of material.
And so Twitter has some announcements to make, apparently, about how they're going to be policing content.
In the near future to not exactly my cup of tea, we'll get to that in a moment.
First, let's face it, most legacy media outlets, they're not just liberal, they are limiting.
Same guests making the same talking points.
There's nothing new.
On the Sunday special, we have a bunch of different viewpoints, right?
We'll have Bill Maher or David Mamet or Andrew Yang.
We'll have libertarians, we'll have democrats, we'll have socialists, we'll have pretty much anyone.
Like everything at the Daily Wire, We are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it goes.
You'll find that with our brand new upcoming documentary with Candace Owens called The Greatest Lie Ever Told.
It's a hard-hitting expose about the death of George Floyd and the rise of BLM.
You'll also find that willingness to talk about pretty much anything.
This week's Sunday special is with my guest, Jonathan Isaac.
We will be discussing Why I Stand.
It's his brand new book.
He just released it with The Daily Wire.
Isaac was the lone NBA player not to kneel for the national anthem during a league-wide demonstration in support of Black Lives Matter.
Buying into the generalized lie that America's police are systemically racist, it's a great episode.
Take a look at the trailer.
Basketball isn't everything.
And if the money was to go tomorrow, if the fame was to go tomorrow, who are you then?
And I had many times of being a rookie in the NBA, doing what I thought I needed to do and having fun, and then looking myself in the mirror and saying, who are you?
Jonathan's story is courageous and inspiring.
The Sunday special will be available this Sunday morning on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Be sure to tune in.
You definitely don't want to miss it.
You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Meanwhile, Twitter is apparently now adding more content guardrails.
According to the Wall Street Journal, this is a potential flashpoint with the company's prospective new owner, Elon Musk, who has said he wants the social media platform to dial back on moderating tweets.
The company said on Thursday it plans to slow what it deems misinformation around crises including armed conflicts, natural disasters, and public health emergencies, and to elevate credible information.
So when you can't win, rig the game, I guess is the idea.
By the way, didn't we already see this?
There's never been any problem with Twitter or social media restricting the free flow of information around controversial issues like public health emergencies.
I mean, they would never get that wrong.
It's not as though they would immediately just begin to censor people who had serious questions to ask about the age striation of COVID or the source of where COVID came from in the first place or lockdown policy.
It's not as though they would ever just, you know, Censor people or ban them for making basic observations about that sort of stuff.
Twitter said it defines a crisis as a situation in which there is widespread threat to life, physical safety, health, or basic subsistence.
The company said it would determine whether claims are misleading through verification from multiple credible publicly available sources, including evidence from conflict monitoring groups, humanitarian organizations, journalists, and others.
That's going to go great.
Because all of those people are super duper trustworthy.
I mean, you can listen to, like, Human Rights Watch, which is not, like, a wild left-wing source, and you can listen to, like, the journalists of the New York Times.
That'd be good, probably.
Probably this will also—this will always be good.
Hopefully, if Elon Musk does end up going through with his purchase of Twitter, then he will put a stop to that.
Speaking of which, There's... Elon Musk suggested the other day that when he said he was not going to vote Democrat, there would be a wave of attacks on him.
Well, the wave has begun.
So according to The Verge, The Verge suddenly, within like a day of this, has come up with the news that SpaceX reportedly paid $250,000 to cover up Elon Musk's sexual misconduct.
According to The Verge, SpaceX reportedly paid a flight attendant $250,000 to ensure she didn't speak out or sue the company after Elon Musk allegedly exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, according to a report from Business Insider.
According to one of the flight attendant's friends, the alleged victim worked as a crew member on a SpaceX corporate flight.
During one of the flights, the attendant told her friend Musk asked her for a full-body massage in his room.
Reportedly, this was not unusual, and SpaceX had encouraged the attendant to get him a SUSE license.
During the massage, Musk allegedly removed the sheet that was covering the lower half of his body, showing her his...
Penis.
While rubbing her leg, he reportedly offered to buy the attendant a horse if she would do more.
The story notes the attendant rode horses.
The allegations were relayed to Insider by one of the flight attendant's friends, who was asked by the attendant's attorney to sign a declaration backing up the claims in 2018.
The friend told Insider the attendant refused to carry out any sexual acts on Musk, and that she was really upset following the flight.
The friend also said SpaceX cut down on the number of shifts she was given following the incident, which the attendant saw as a sign of retaliation.
Apparently, the attendant filed a complaint to the SpaceX HR department in 2018, saying her career with the company had suffered because of her refusal.
The company took the complaint to a mediator, not a court or an arbitrator, and signed the attendant to a $250,000 severance agreement, barring her from saying anything bad about Musk or his companies, including SpaceX and Tesla.
This included talking about the payment itself.
Musk apparently said there was a lot more to the story.
He said it was a politically motivated hit piece.
He had warned that he would be the victim of such tricks.
Now, let me just say this.
A $250,000 settlement?
When you are talking about alleging that one of the richest people on planet Earth propositioned you for sex and then retaliated against you via his company?
That is called a nuisance settlement.
Okay?
That is what that is right there.
Just anybody who knows corporate law understands this.
Just the legal bills on something like this outstrip $250,000 easily, by far.
The bad publicity at a trial outstrips the cost of this, by far.
And if she really had the goods, and if she had witnesses, and she had any evidence whatsoever, if any of that had been the case, you think that her lawyers would have told her to settle for a quarter million dollars from Elon Musk?
Are you out of your mind?
Are you crazy?
Okay, what this really sounds like from outside indicators, the indicator mainly being the size of the settlement.
Like, if he had settled for five million bucks, you'd be like, oh, that's pretty bad.
Like, that's big enough that if it were untrue, he probably would have fought it.
But a $250,000 settlement that she takes to walk away when she's alleging that he literally exposed himself to her and asked her to perform a sexual act on him and then retaliated against her in terms of her job.
I have a hard time believing that that story would have held together in court.
Let's put it that way.
Because no one settles for a quarter million dollars with that fact pattern if that fact pattern has any evidence to it or if that fact pattern is true.
It's... that is... that is weak... that is weak-tea.
The friend of the flight attendant said that the attendant told her about the misconduct while they were on a hike together shortly after the London trip.
The friend described the attendant as distraught and visibly shaken.
She was really upset.
The friend said she didn't know what to do.
Again, she could be telling the truth.
I'm just saying that the timing of this story is really, really suspicious.
Not only is the timing suspicious, the $250,000 severance payment is not enough to pay for credible allegations of this sort.
The friend told the insider she decided to come forward without consulting the flight attendant.
Because as a survivor of sexual assault, she felt an obligation to share what she had been told about Musk.
Unlike the flight attendant, her friend is not bound by any non-disclosure agreement.
She said, I absolutely felt a responsibility to come forward with it, especially now.
He's the richest man in the world.
Someone with that level of power causing that kind of harm and then throwing some money at the situation that's not accountability.
There are predators all over the world.
When someone is particularly wealthy and powerful, they literally have systems that are like a machine working for them to set them up to be able to do whatever they want.
Remaining silent, said the friend, would make her complicit.
You become part of the machine that allows someone like Elon Musk to continue to do the horrible things that he has done.
The friend said her primary concern was clearly her client.
She said before she reached out to the insider, she called the attorney who represented the victim, and the attorney told her that she was free to speak to the press, but sharing any documents could put the flight attendant at risk.
She recalled the attorney saying the confidentiality provisions are BS, and that if any other women have been victimized by Musk, they ought to come forward.
But the attorney urged the friend not to share the declaration.
The attorney did not respond to requests for a comment.
So, again, I find this highly non-convincing.
Let's put it that way.
The media are trying to now cobble together an entire case against Elon Musk.
They're trying to take him out politically.
None of this is a shock.
The media do this sort of stuff all the time.
They're trying to drag up allegations that there was sexual harassment at a Tesla factory where men at the factory ogled women and remarked on their clothes, according to complaints, leading some women to wear baggy outfits and use stacks of boxes to obstruct the views of leering co-workers.
I don't even know, how do you evidence this?
How do you evidence this?
But apparently evidence is no longer really necessary in any case.
So, there is that.
Meanwhile, in other bad news for Democrats, the knockdown-dragout battle that's happening at the New York congressional level continues.
So, Hakeem Jeffries is very upset because the new map that's been drawn in New York is creating all sorts of havoc.
It's wreaking havoc inside the Democratic contingent.
You've got Sean Maloney, the head of the DCCC, who's now going up in the same district.
As another young up-and-coming progressive congressperson and being encouraged to step down.
You have a disaster area brewing with regard to some of the other New York maps, including Carolyn Maloney going up against Jerry Nadler.
I mean, it's just a mess.
So Jeffries has now launched an aggressive effort to discredit a proposed congressional map that would divide historically black neighborhoods in New York, likening its configuration to Jim Crow tactics.
Jeffries is spending tens of thousands of dollars on digital advertising as part of a scorched-earth campaign to try to stop New York courts from making the new map final without changes later this week.
Jeffries said we find ourselves in an all-hands-on-deck moment.
In his most recent ad, he says the changes took a sledgehammer to black districts.
It's enough to make Jim Crow blush.
Amazing how Jim Crow has really evolved in America.
Jim Crow went from, you know, black people not being able to vote and being prohibited from going to the same restaurants as white people and being prohibited from going to the same schools as white people and being prohibited from marrying white people.
It went from that to People having to show ID in Georgia, and also districts not being drawn to Hakeem Jeffries' specific liking in the state of New York, an extraordinarily blue state.
So Jim Crow is really morphing around here.
After New York's highest court struck down Democrat-friendly maps drawn by the state legislature as unconstitutional last month, the judges have vested near total power in Jonathan Service, a New York court-appointed special master.
Service's initial proposal unwound a map gerrymandered by the Democratic-led state legislature, creating new pickup opportunities for Republicans.
But it also significantly altered the shapes of districts in New York City, carefully drawn a decade earlier by another court that reflected a patchwork of racial, geographic, and economic divides.
Jeffries was far from alone in lodging last-ditch appeals.
The court was inundated with hundreds of comments suggesting revisions from both Democrats and Republicans, from party lawyers pressing for more politically favorable lines to an analysis of the difference between Jewish families on the east and west sides of Manhattan.
The proposed map would divide Bedford, Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and Brownsville, culturally significant black communities in Brooklyn, between the 8th and 9th congressional districts.
Each neighborhood currently falls in one or the other.
So, again, the Democrats tried to draw an extraordinarily corrupt map.
They got stopped by a court, and now they are fighting against the court.
So things are just going swimmingly for the Democrats here.
Probably if they talk about racism and abortion more, then it'll go fine for them in 2022, probably, I think.
Alrighty, we've reached the end of today's show.
However, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
First, you can't forget to end your week by checking out The Andrew Klavan Show.
Drew's shows every Friday.
He's got an exciting evening planned for you.
Head on over to dailywire.com at 7 p.m.
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Central.
Tune in.
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