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May 23, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:47
China, Monkeypox, and Recession, Oh My! | Ep. 1500
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Joe Biden says the United States will militarily defend Taiwan in case of Chinese invasion.
Monkeypox freaks out the world.
And stocks continue to edge into bear market territory as the administration desperately flails.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash, Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Well, your 2022 bingo card is getting rather full.
So we have recession.
Now we have monkey pox.
I didn't have that one on the bingo card.
And we have possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
So this morning's breaking news that the president of the United States had gone out on a limb and he had said that the United States would militarily defend Taiwan if Taiwan was invaded.
This is what the president of the United States said in a press conference and There are some good things about this and there's some bad things about this.
The bad thing about this is that it is utterly unclear whether this is in fact the case.
Here is Joe Biden saying it.
Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?
Yes.
You are?
That's a commitment we made.
And my expectation is it will not happen.
It will not be attempted.
So, there you have it.
Joe Biden saying that the commitment that we made is to defend Taiwan militarily.
Now, the real commitment that we have is to give Taiwan the weaponry to defend itself militarily if China were to invade.
On a strategic level, on a geo-strategic level, it is not a bad thing for China to think that the United States might directly involve itself militarily if Taiwan were to be invaded.
After all, Taiwan is significantly more strategically important than Ukraine is by any stretch of the imagination.
It is not particularly close.
Ukraine is not the source of a wild variety of really vital resources to the world.
And they're responsible for some grain, but that grain can be made up in other places.
Taiwan is responsible for nearly all advanced semiconductors on planet Earth at this point, which means that if China were to grab control of that, it would deprive the United States of pretty much all the advanced technology necessary to run an enormous number of our industries as well as a lot of our military tech, because a lot of that stuff, those semiconductors are used in a lot of the machinery that we use in the military as well.
So there's that problem if China were to take Taiwan.
There's the problem of China beginning to encircle Australia.
There's the problem of China beginning to encircle Japan.
There's essentially the fact that the United States would then have no real base of operations, would be increasingly pushed out to sea in terms of geo-strategic military-naval impact.
There's some real problems with China taking Taiwan.
And the reality is that if China attempted to take Taiwan at this point in time, Taiwan could inflict significant casualties on the Chinese, but China would win.
I mean, China is a much larger country.
China does have a massive military.
China might lose 50, 75, 100,000 soldiers, but they would still end up taking the island of Taiwan if they had to.
And again, the proximity of China to Taiwan, I mean, they're separated only by the Taiwan Strait.
That proximity means that our ability to resupply is extremely limited in that part of the world.
So when Joe Biden says that we will militarily defend Taiwan, there are a couple ways to read that.
One is good.
This is us trying to scare the Chinese off the mark.
It's us trying to say to the Chinese, listen, you should just know upfront that if things get hot here, we will be there with our weaponry ready to fight you.
That is the upside.
The downside is, it's not really true if that's the case.
And it's not clear that that's the case.
The United States has not made itself militarily ready for an actual battle over Taiwan with the Chinese.
We don't have the resources in theater.
We don't have the ability to resupply, as I say.
We don't actually have the ability to fight and win a war for Taiwan at this point because we have depleted our military resources, and we've particularly depleted our naval resources over the course of the last 20 years or so.
This is a real problem.
So you saw Joe Biden's team actually trying to walk this sucker back as soon as he said it, which is the third time in the last year that Joe Biden has suggested there will be military intervention directly by the United States.
And his team has said, well, not so fast.
Again, if you want to make this the new policy of the United States, I'm all for it.
I actually am.
I think that the United States does have a massive strategic interest in protecting the independence of Taiwan.
I think that the kind of strategic ambiguity as to whether there is one China, including Taiwan, or whether Taiwan is an independent nation is incredibly stupid.
Taiwan is an independent nation.
It has its own independent government.
It is not governed by the Chinese government, nor should it be.
And the fact that the West was strategically ambiguous with regard to Hong Kong for 20 years means that Hong Kong is now subjected to Chinese tyranny and they literally just walked in with no casualties and took over the place and no one said boo.
So either you draw a hard line or you don't draw a hard line.
So on a geostrategic level, I'm very much in favor of the idea that the United States is going to stop China from invading Taiwan.
On an actual practical level, can we do that?
And are we making commitments that we're unable to fulfill?
That is a serious problem.
That is a real problem.
And so when you have Joe Biden out front saying things that Maybe we wish were true, but maybe we don't actually have the stones or the brass to back up.
The problem is, if Joe Biden says, we will get ourselves involved militarily, that could also have one of two impacts.
One is that it tells the Chinese, don't do it because the price is going to be too high.
And even if you were to win Taiwan, you would then be in a state of war with the United States and you really don't want that.
That is possibility number one.
Possibility number two is that Xi looks at Biden and he says, I'm going to call your bluff.
You've now just ratcheted tensions up.
I don't think you have the resources in theater to prevent us from actually taking Taiwan.
I think you might have those resources in theater over the next couple of years if this is your new strategic proposal.
And so I'm actually going to try to take Taiwan like ASAP.
I'm going to try and go in there and take it before you can get more resources over there.
So this is the problem with getting out over your skis the way that Joe Biden has.
If you're going to announce a policy like this, it actually has to be a real policy change with the brass to back it up.
And when I say the brass, I mean the military wherewithal to actually back up the plan.
According to the Wall Street Journal, President Biden said the United States would respond militarily to defend Taiwan if China tries to take it by force, sparking uncertainty over whether the United States was moving away from its longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity and prompting a clarification from the White House.
And again, this is what happens with Biden a lot.
Is you're never sure whether it's the dementia talking or an actual policy change?
Is applesauce for brains actually saying something that is a real policy shift for the United States?
Or is the night nurse team from the press comms corps going to have to come out and explain away what he was just trying to do?
Biden's comments were met with anger from Beijing and praise from Taipei.
They were also part of a pattern.
In August and October of last year, the president answered questions on Taiwan by suggesting a break in U.S.
policy toward the democratically self-ruled island, only to have aides jump in to say nothing had changed.
This time, he was speaking alongside the Japanese Prime Minister in Tokyo during his first trip to Asia as Commander-in-Chief.
The president was asked if the United States would get involved militarily in response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan after declining to send troops to Ukraine to fight Russia's invasion.
He said, yes, that's the commitment that we made.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin raised his voice when asked at a regular briefing about Biden's remarks.
He said China has no room for compromise and concession on core concerns like Taiwan and will take firm action to safeguards its sovereignty and security interests.
We do what we say.
Biden in his Monday remarks stressed the U.S.
remains committed to the Bedrock One China policy, which recognizes the present rulers as the only legitimate government and acknowledges Beijing's claim that Taiwan is a part of the nation.
But the president said that policy does not give China the right to forcefully take over the island.
He says, we agree with the one China policy and all the attendant agreements we made.
But the idea that it can be taken by force, just taken by force, would just not be appropriate.
It would dislocate the entire region.
It would be another action similar to what happened in Ukraine.
So it's a burden that is even stronger.
He also played down the possibility China would try to take Taiwan.
He says, my expectation is this will not happen.
But Joe Biden's expectations count for nothing, considering that he also expected the Taliban would never take Afghanistan, which happened to be the case for approximately negative 37 seconds.
And he also suggested that the Russians would probably not invade Ukraine.
And then he suggested they would invade Ukraine.
And then he suggested the Russians would fully take Ukraine.
And then he suggested that we were going to beat them back.
So Joe Biden's ability to predict things is extremely limited.
And the man can't predict his own ballot movements at this point.
point.
Taiwan is thankful to the United States for its rock solid commitment, according to Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Joanne Au.
Responding to Biden's commitment, a White House official underscored the president's assertion that American policy toward Taiwan has not changed.
The official said Biden was referring to the US.
obligation to bolster Taipei's ability to defend itself, which is enshrined in the Taiwan Relations Act.
That act, passed in 1979, portrays any attempt to determine Taiwan's political future through anything other than peaceful means as a threat to American interests.
Congress is committed to selling defensive weapons to Taiwan, but Washington has previously avoided saying whether it would intervene directly in the event of an invasion.
And again, he has said that in the past, like routinely, and then his team has to keep walking it back, which makes us look confused, and it makes it look as though we have no plan over there, which is, of course, not a good thing.
Now, I will say for Joe Biden that it seems as though some of the moves that he is now making with regard to China are good.
So he is traveling over to Asia, and he's doing what presidents of both parties have been attempting to do over the course of the last 10 years, maybe the only bipartisan policy in the United States at this point, and that is to try to Hem in China by making alliances with the surrounding nations.
According to the New York Times, Biden has enlisted a dozen Asia-Pacific nations to join a new loosely defined economic bloc meant to counter China's dominance and reassert American influence in the region five years after his predecessor withdrew the United States from a sweeping trade accord it had negotiated itself.
The alliance will bring the United States together with Japan, South Korea, and India to establish new rules of commerce in the fastest growing part of the world and offer an alternative to Beijing's leadership.
Wary of liberal opposition at home, Biden's new partnership will avoid the market access provisions of traditional trade deals, raising the question of how meaningful it will be.
So again, if it's empty sort of stuff, then it really doesn't do anything.
If it's just like, hey, we're all friends, isn't that great?
You actually have to have a regional trade bloc that liberalizes the economic trading rules with these nations in order to create a counter-incentive for them to join with the Chinese, who are a huge security threat on the border of all these countries.
Biden said, we're going to help all of the country's economies grow faster and fairer.
The president was sitting alongside Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, as well as Prime Fumio Kishida of Japan for the rollout of the initiative, while other leaders joined the event by video conference.
This is, again, part of the Biden strategy to try to bring in China, which, again, is a good strategy, and it's been pursued by members of both parties.
The New York Times tries to cover it as though Trump was not trying to do this.
He was.
He was just doing it through bilateral trade agreements, as opposed to through transnational trade agreements.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo says it is by any account the most significant international economic engagement the United States has ever had in this region.
The launch of it tomorrow in Tokyo marks an important turning point in restoring U.S.
economic leadership in the region and presenting Indo-Pacific countries an alternative to China's approach to these critical issues.
And again, I've spoken with top-level Democrats on this particular stuff, I've spoken with top-level Republicans.
There is a widespread bipartisan consensus.
There needs to be economic activity designed to counter rising Chinese influence, particularly the Belt and Road Program in China, especially at a time of Chinese weakness.
And China is not in strong economic position right now.
They have massive outstanding debts.
The Chinese economy is a bit of a mess, and it's been a bit, when I say a bit, I mean a lot of a mess for a very long time.
And they are sort of threatening to expand territorial holdings to counter the fact that they are in a bit of an economic mess.
Alright, coming up, China is now boosting its own security pact with a bunch of island nations in order to spread its actual military power, its hard power, all across the Pacific region.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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According to the Financial Times, China is intensifying its drive for influence in the Pacific by negotiating security deals with two additional island nations following a pact with the Solomon Islands, according to officials in the United States and allied countries.
Beijing's talks with Kiribati, a Pacific island nation 3,000 kilometers from Hawaii, where U.S.
Indo-Pacific Command is based, are the most advanced, the official said.
They're in talks with Kiribati and at least one more Pacific island country over an agreement that would cover much of the same ground as that with the Solomon Islands, said an intelligence official from U.S.
ally.
The warning that Beijing is trying to further increase its clout in the Pacific came as Joe Biden began his visit to Asia amid regional concerns about China's push for influence.
So, according to a leaked draft deal from March, the pact with the Solomon Islands could allow China to send its own police and military forces to the islands, a development that shocked the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific from Australia and New Zealand to Japan.
And now they are setting their sights on Kiribati as well.
So they're trying again to spread out their territorial footprint across the Pacific region.
And the United States is trying to counter that.
Now this is a time, as I say, of economic weakness for the Chinese.
So the fact that the Biden administration is pursuing more of an anti-China policy is a good thing.
And again, maybe the only bipartisan part of the American political scene right now.
Joe Biden, you know, he's kind of, I think it's good.
I think he's actually approaching a larger scale anti-China approach that is a good thing.
And so, for example, yesterday, Joe Biden over the weekend, he said that our economy is growing at a faster rate than China.
He's trying to prop up his own economic plans, but using China as the counter is not a terrible thing here.
Even in the face of historic economic challenges, our economy is providing and proving to be resilient.
In fact, just yesterday, an independent analysis projected that the American economy is poised to grow at a faster rate than China and the Chinese economy for the first time in 45 years.
I mean, listen, it's painful to listen to the guy try to stumble out sentences, but by the same token, you know, what he is saying in competition with China is not a bad thing.
The reason that China, by the way, is failing is because China has embraced Joe Biden's policies to the fullest, meaning domestic subsidies and massive borrowing plans via huge spending.
So one of the weird things about the Biden administration is at the same time they're trying to counter rising Chinese influence in the Pacific, which is good.
They're trying to create free trade blocks, which is good.
And they're trying to make more overt security guarantees to Taiwan, which if they can back that up, all of that is good.
They're trying to pursue bad economic policy at home that looks more like China.
Article in the Wall Street Journal today pointing out that China spends an enormous amount of money on exactly the kind of stuff that the Biden administration likes.
Quote, China spends much more in helping favored industries with state-directed funds, cheap loans, and other government incentives than other major economies, according to a new study expected to intensify the debate in Washington and elsewhere over Beijing's use of industrial policy.
The study, to be published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Monday, finds that China's backing of its companies amounted to at least 1.73% of its gross domestic product in 2019, and that trend is continuing.
In dollar terms, that's more than $248 billion based on market exchange rates, exceeding China's estimated military spending, or $407 billion based on exchange rates that adjust for different costs across countries.
China's spending, both as a share of GDP and in dollar terms, is significantly higher than that of seven other economies analyzed in the report, including South Korea, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, the U.S.
and Brazil.
The United States, by contrast, spent 0.39% of its GDP on industrial support in 2019.
Oddly enough, people failed to see the connection between the fact that China has subsidized domestic industries to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year and the fact that China's economy is failing.
They treat that as though we should imitate the Chinese.
Well, maybe the reason China's economy sucks is because they keep redirecting money from what would be their most market-friendly uses and toward a bunch of stuff that the Chinese Politburo thinks would be a good idea.
Beijing's disclosure of subsidies is murky at best, according to China's analysts.
Its use of industrial policy is one of the most contentious issues involving the country's statist economic model.
So isolating China, again, all of this is a good thing.
Maybe the only good thing the Biden administration is doing at this point, but that only works if there is some sort of predictable and reliable Attempt to fulfill promises and the Biden administration so far has been unable to do that in other parts of the world, although they have done a better job in Ukraine.
And meanwhile, the other headline on your 2022 monkey pox bingo card, you didn't think monkey pox can be on there, did you?
And that was that was weird.
So now we've shifted from talking about COVID to talking about monkey pox.
And apparently we're supposed to be very worried about it.
According to the president of the United States, everybody should be concerned about monkey pox, which is weird because I'm not concerned at all about monkey pox.
I'll explain why momentarily.
Mr. President, quick question.
What have your health advisors told you your level of concern should be about monkeypox and the cases that are in the United States and around the world?
Well, they haven't told me the level of exposure yet, but it is something that everybody should be concerned about.
We're working on it hard to figure out what we do and what vaccine, if any, may be available for us.
Should we all be worried about monkeypox?
Well, the data suggests no.
According to Sky News in the UK, the UK is facing a significant rise in monkeypox cases over the next week, an expert has warned, as new infections were reported in mainland Europe and the United States.
More than 100 confirmed or suspected cases have been reported globally, including 20 in the UK, with a majority of infections in Spain linked to a sauna in Madrid.
Switzerland recorded its first confirmed case on Saturday after an infected person developed a fever and a rash and felt unwell.
The infection followed close physical contact abroad, which is a euphemism.
The affected person is isolating at home.
Officials in the Netherlands said on Saturday that several patients had contracted monkeypox a day after the country recorded its first case.
And in Germany, at least two cases of monkeypox have been recorded in Berlin after the country's first infection was detected in Munich on Friday.
Apparently, it has now appeared in a patient in New York City, as well as some people in Florida.
Israel also reported its first case on Saturday, a man in his 30s who had just returned from a trip to Western Europe.
So, it is in a bunch of countries.
So why exactly am I not particularly concerned about it?
Well, because it turns out that it's sexually transmitted, apparently.
And so the best science that we have available suggests that it is dudes screwing one another that is creating the spread of monkeypox.
According to The Guardian, a senior advisor for the WHO has said the monkeypox outbreak seems to be spreading through sexual contact and warned that case numbers could spike over the summer months as people attend major summer gatherings and festivals.
David Heyman, chair of the WHO's Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on Infectious Hazards with Pandemic and Epidemic Potential, led a meeting of the group on Friday because of the urgency of the situation.
Heyman told Reuters the WHO is working on the theory that cases so far identified were driven by sexual contact.
What seems to be happening now is it got into the population as a sexual form, as a genital form, and is being spread as are sexually transmitted infections, which has amplified its transmission around the world, said Heyman.
Heyman is a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, He said the monkeypox outbreak did not resemble the early days of COVID because it does not transmit as easily.
There are vaccines available.
The most important message is you can protect yourself.
So we are going to do the same thing now that we've done in the past.
We're going to pretend that a disease that is particularly affecting people who engage in a particular type of activity actually might hit you.
Which, of course, is not correct.
The WHO is now issuing a statement.
They say, as we enter the summer season, with mass gatherings, festivals, and parties, I am concerned at the admission that the transmission of monkeypox could accelerate.
This is according to Hans Kluge, the WHO's top official on the continent.
He says the cases currently being detected are among those engaging in sexual activity.
But he's warning that you shouldn't go to, like, big events.
Britain had registered, by the way, 20 monkeypox infections as of Friday.
A notable proportion of them were among gay and bisexual men.
But we are all supposed to apparently now not go to mass gatherings because we might slip and fall onto asexually transmitted disease in some way.
I'm just going to note here that the scientific differential with regard to expectations and behavior is really, really astonishing.
It is quite a stunning thing.
Alrighty, when it comes to COVID, we're supposed to mask up for all time.
When it comes to promiscuous sex in saunas, however, well, we can't be expected to stop that.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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When it comes to COVID, we are supposed to mask up until the end of time.
It is vital that we mask up until the end of time.
If we are in public, we must mask up.
We must make sure that our kids are masked up.
We must vaccinate ourselves 1,000 consecutive times, even if we've already been double-vaccinated and had Omicron.
That last one describes me.
I was double-vaccinated and I had Omicron.
We're still supposed to vax 1 million times consecutively until 80% of our body weight is actually composed.
Advice number two is I agree with Mayor Adams that when you're in an indoor space, you should be wearing a mask.
White House, we are supposed to continue masking up.
Here's Ashish Jha from the White House saying, when you are in a crowded area this summer, you should continue to wear a surgical mask so we all feel better about one another.
Advice number two is I agree with Mayor Adams that when you're in indoor space, you should be wearing a mask.
I feel that very strongly that in crowded indoor spaces, in places with high transmission, people should be doing.
Okay, so we're supposed to all mask up in public places because after all, we have to stop this or slow this.
Well, we can't do any of those things, actually.
Pretty much everybody has immunity, either natural or vax, at this point.
But we're going to call on you to do all those things, right?
We're going to do all that.
We're going to shut down businesses for a couple of years.
We're going to shut down the world economy and destroy it.
We're going to make sure that your small business never opens again.
We're going to keep your kids out of school.
We're going to mask up your small children.
We're going to force you to jab your kids, like, several times in a row.
We're going to do all of those things to stop the spread of COVID.
If you suggest that Monkeypox is not a global crisis, and that it is instead being driven by gay men having sex with one another, this apparently is really, really bad.
Because you can't expect gay men not to have sex with one another for like a month.
You can't.
This is according to Greg Gonsalves over at Yale.
He is a research epidemiology expert focusing on infectious disease.
He's been an AIDS activist for 30 years.
He's an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health.
Here is his thread today.
And it's so telling about the sort of activity that we are expected as human beings to engage in versus what we are expected not to engage in.
So like breathing, not jabbing your kids, like all that stuff.
Put it by the wayside.
We can handle it.
Not going to work, not going to school.
That's the price of doing business.
But if you say to people, perhaps to prevent the spread of monkeypox, you shouldn't go to a sauna and screw somebody else, then apparently you have violated all strictures of decency when it comes to human behavior.
Here's Greg Goncalves.
So, a threat on monkeypox.
I'm not an expert on the pathogen, but right now, many of the cases are in gay men.
I know something about infectious diseases among men who have sex with men.
First, it is not a gay disease.
If you say it is, you are perpetuating stigma and ignorance, damaging the public health response to this, and endangering lives.
Well, I mean, I'm not saying that it is purely a gay disease.
I mean, presumably, a bisexual person could have sex with a person of the opposite sex and transmit the disease.
But when you see that this is being transmitted largely among gay men, then you have to say that it is largely being transmitted among gay men.
I mean, that happens to be the fact of the case.
But the goal here is always to present that sexual activity has nothing to do with any of this sort of stuff.
So there's a piece over at PLOS.org.
PLOS is the Public Library of Science.
And they have an entire article on this, saying stigma directed at a particular group of individuals fuels fear and seriously impedes upon outbreak investigation, case identification and public health interventions.
The repercussions of labeling HIV infection a homosexual disease led to unsolved suffering in gay communities in the 80s who were blamed for the epidemic.
Well, I mean, the reality is that in the 80s, there was an attempt by a lot of public intellectuals to pretend that it wasn't predominantly being spread in the gay community.
And there was a massive panic that straight people were going to spread HIV at exorbitant rates, which was not the case.
By the way, none of this is to justify discrimination against homosexual people or people who engage in this activity, but to not Tell the truth about which diseases are linked to which kind of, I mean, like, we will link your breathing on another person to COVID and we will blame you and we will shame you if you don't get the vaccine.
But if we say that a disease is spreading predominantly among gay men who are having sex with one another, then it's homophobic?
Like, that's not the way that this works.
Describing disease vectors is not homophobic.
It just happens to be a fact.
And trying to pretend that it is some act of wild discrimination to describe how diseases are passed is really, really silly.
It's not only really silly, it's anti-data, but you have Greg Gonsalves saying, Okay, well, I mean, it's not just close physical contact, it's not just us all going to a movie together.
I mean, we're not all having sex with one another at movies.
At least not the kind of movies I go to.
But according to Greg Gonsalves, the answer isn't to shut down all these parties, or tell gay men to stop having sex with them, or dancing in close proximity to each other.
It won't work!
I'm just going to find a point here.
Just put a focus on that.
It won't work.
Shutting down your businesses for two years.
It'll work.
Mask up, everyone, including the babies, with surgical masks that don't fit their face properly.
It'll work.
Make sure everybody is vaxxed one million times.
It'll probably work.
Shut down air travel.
You know, that'll work.
What if we blow out the economy like $7 trillion?
That'll work.
It'll all work.
Everything works.
But if you tell people not to have sex with one another for five minutes, it won't work.
It just won't.
It hasn't worked for HIV or other kinds of infectious disease outbreaks among gay men.
A friend has said, this is what we do.
Don't panic.
Don't stigmatize.
Don't suddenly become sex negative.
You wouldn't want that.
Sex negativity.
You know, saying that perhaps you should only have sex with a committed partner.
Monogamy is a bad, I mean, wouldn't want that.
That'd be, that'd be terrible.
Educate men on what to watch out for, ask people to stay home if they're sick, or have some unusual lesion pop up even if they aren't planning to have sex.
If we jump to cancel events and stop having sex, we lose any hope of an effective response later if this doesn't burn itself out.
It's unbelievable.
Apparently all we had to do to defeat the COVID lockdown, folks, is we should have said from the very beginning, what we need to do is stop People from having promiscuous sex with one another and the entire left would have been like, no, no, that's impossible.
We can't do that.
That'd be no.
You know what?
No lockdowns, guys.
The lockdowns are over.
You can go back to business as usual.
Just enjoy your lives.
Send the kids to school.
I mean, anything to protect the promiscuous sex.
We got to do that.
It would be just like to all human.
We can't expect humans to not engage in promiscuous sexual activity at bars.
We can't expect people to do that.
The best thing is, Greg Gonsalves says, I mean, they don't apply this at all to COVID, but they apply it to monkeypox, which so far has affected like 100 people globally.
It's crazy!
I'm sorry, that's nuts.
But it's kind of hilarious.
Right, again, I'm just going to read that again slowly.
Pretend this applied to COVID for one second.
Don't panic.
Don't stigmatize.
Don't suddenly become work, school, breathing, mass gathering, church negative.
Educate people on what to watch out for.
Ask people to stay home if they're sick.
So apparently, again, now, the chief threat here is that society might encourage people not to have promiscuous sex, and therefore we have to, you know, we wouldn't want to do that.
That would be super bad.
So, just going to point out the unbelievable hypocrisy with regard to what we expect people to do versus what we expect people not to do.
It's unthinkable, unthinkable to ask people not to have promiscuous sex with one another at rock concerts, but it is absolutely thinkable to shut down entire societies for years at a time based on a disease that largely kills the elderly.
Slow clap for our nation's public intellectuals.
Slow clap for the experts.
You guys are doing great.
You're doing great.
Meanwhile, speaking of the experts, so remember that time when we were supposed to have an unprecedented economic recovery that was going to just ease right into a boom, considering that we had artificially made the economy comatose in 2020?
Remember that?
Well, yeah, now we're going to get a bear market.
So according to the Wall Street Journal, The stock market is on the verge of an actual bear market.
They say U.S.
stocks are in the midst of their longest selloff in decades.
Whether they are close to bottoming is anyone's guess.
Market selloffs have long stumped strategists trying to predict whether they were close to done.
Some have concluded with bursts of panicked sellings.
Others, such as the one lasting from 1973 to 1974, ground to an end after days of subdued trading volumes.
Many investors and analysts looking back at historic pullbacks believe that the current slump that has put the S&P 500 on the cusp of a bear market still has a way to go.
The index is down 19% from its January 3rd record, flirting with the 20% decline that would end the bull market that began in March 2020.
This year's stock sell-off, now in its fifth month, has already gone on far longer than the typical pullback occurring without a recession, according to the Deutsche Bank.
Yet the Federal Reserve is still in the early stages of its campaign to raise interest rates.
Meaning financial conditions will tighten further and put more pressure on stocks in the coming months.
Many people are skeptical the central bank will be able to keep raising rates without tipping the economy into a recession.
A period when stocks have typically fallen about 30% going back to 1929.
So it is unclear at this point how deeply the stock market is going to dump.
But the answer is it ain't gonna be pretty.
During past bear markets, the stock market dump has ranged anywhere from like 50%, that was October 2007 to 08, to a low of like 25 to 30%.
That was January to March of 2009.
David Rosenberg, president and chief economist at Rosenberg Research says, quote, there's not a chance in hell the federal will be able to crush inflation without significantly impairing domestic demand.
So stock declines have now become just part of what is being predicted.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Conditions are ripe for a deep bear market.
With the S&P 500 briefly on Friday down 20% from its January peak, it's very tempting to start trying to call the end of the sell-off.
The problem is, it's only one of the conditions, for a rally is in place and everyone is scared.
That worked beautifully for timing the start of the 2020 rebound.
This time around may not be enough.
The other requirements are that investors start to see a way through the challenges and that policymakers start to help.
That confidence is already weak.
Surveys of sentiment show fund managers, private investors, and financial newsletters are already at March 2020 levels of caution about stocks.
Options that protect against market falls haven't been so popular since back then either.
Consumer sentiment is actually worse than it was then.
This time, central bankers are scared not by falling markets or by economic outlook, but by inflation.
Sure, if something major breaks in the financial system, they'll refocus on finance, and a recession could prompt them to rethink rate increases.
But for now, inflation means falling stock prices are seen merely as a side effect of tighter monetary policy, not a reason to invoke the Fed put and rescue investors.
There's nothing magical about a fall of 20%, the usual definition of a bear market, but it does crop up a lot.
In the past 40 years, the S&P 500 bottomed out with a 20% or so peak to trough decline four times, 1990, 1998, 2011, 2018.
Another four times, it had far bigger losses as true panic took hold.
It's unclear at this point just exactly what this looks like when we hit the bottom.
And it is unclear how resilient the economy is either.
Small businesses are freaking out.
According to Ruth Simon at the Wall Street Journal, small businesses are flashing warning signs on the U.S.
economy as inflation, supply chain snarls, a shortage of workers, and rising interest rates darken the outlook for entrepreneurs.
Fifty-seven percent of small business owners expect economic conditions in the U.S.
to worsen in the next year, up from 42 percent in April, equal to the all-time low recorded in April of 2020.
Almost six in ten small business owners think that the economic conditions are going to get worse, which they are.
That measure is one part of a broader confidence index that in May posted its largest year-over-year drop since the COVID shutdowns of April and May 2020.
Despite rising prices, the portion of small businesses that expects revenue to increase in the coming year fell to 61%, that is down from 79% in May 2020.
It just feels like there are all these factors that are out of your control, and it doesn't seem like there's a light at the end of the tunnel, said Minnie Long, the owner of Chai Kitchen, manufacturer of kimchi and other fermented Asian-flavored vegetables.
Again, small businesses and large companies are feeling the strain at this point, and all of this is having a massive impact on Joe Biden's prospect for 2022.
Things are looking really ugly out there.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, Biden and his advisors are already grappling with inflation trending near a four-decade high, wavering consumer confidence, headwinds posed by Russia's war in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell recently said, it's this president and his all-Democratic government who have drained American families' pocketbooks.
Every poll shows our citizens understand that sad reality all too well.
Already coming up, Joe Biden's numbers, based on the economy, are just horrible.
And he's going to pay the price for it.
We'll get some more on that in just one second.
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Alright folks, if you've seen any of the Daily Wire original documentaries, you know that we are relentless in our pursuit of the truth no matter the subject matter.
This year, we are confronting radical gender ideology in Matt Walsh's upcoming What Is Woman.
That documentary is so good.
Oh my goodness.
I can't wait to bring it to you.
We've debunked the abortion industry and choosing death.
And now, exposing the media-driven lies that sanctified George Floyd and gave rise to BLM in The Greatest Lie Ever Told with Candace Owens.
Well, you know Candace.
You've seen how she's been merciless over the last couple of years, calling out the Black Lives Matter movement and the lies that they were built on, the lies that hypnotized the country, and then defrauded it of millions of dollars to speak nothing of the damage it caused and the lies it claimed, especially Black Lives Ruined.
When you set out to make a documentary, you don't actually know where the documentary is going to lead.
It's an actual process.
Well, as it turns out, Candace has uncovered some amazing stuff.
We're going to take some more time before putting this film out there.
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The greatest lie ever told.
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You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So the Biden administration really struggling here.
The economic numbers for Joe Biden are just brutal.
A new poll from Axios shows 69% of Americans say that the economy is bad.
65% said that Biden is slow to react when issues arise.
And 63% described the state of the country as uneasy and worrying.
All of which prompted Presidential Chief of Staff Ron Klain to tweet out, I hate to spoil the narrative, But this poll, it's a CBS News poll, shows the president's approval rating moving up and solid public confidence on the two biggest issues he inherited, COVID and jobs.
The public confidence on COVID is because everyone's already had it.
And when it comes to jobs, yes, we have a low unemployment rate.
Also, that poll shows Joe Biden at a 44% approval rating.
When you're bragging about a 44% approval rating as the chief of staff, that is what we call whistling past the political graveyard right here.
Even the New York Times is beginning to note how bad things look for the Democrats.
Standing at the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Raphael Warnock led a sermon on the last Sunday before Georgia's Tuesday primaries that was about getting to where you need to go and navigating the challenges ahead.
Rise up and transform every opposition, every obstacle into an opportunity, Warnock urged.
He's not explicitly talking about his job as U.S.
Senator, but he might as well have been.
For months, nearly all of the political oxygen in Georgia and beyond has been sucked up by ferocious Republican primaries, intraparty feuds that have become proxy wars for Donald Trump's power, fueled by his retribution agenda.
But the ugliness of the GOP infighting has at times obscured a political landscape that is increasingly tilted in the Republican direction in Georgia and nationally.
Democrats were excited for Stacey Abrams, the former state legislator and voting rights activist, to jump into the 2022 governor's race, promising a potential rematch of the 2018 contest she only narrowly lost.
Warnock has emerged not only as a compelling speaker, but as one of his party's strongest fundraisers.
Yet the growing fear for Democrats is that even the strongest candidates and recruits can outrun President Biden's wheezing approval ratings by only so much, and are at risk of getting washed away in a developing red wave.
I think 2020 was a referendum on Trump, said Ashley Fogel, 44-year-old Democrat living in Atlanta.
I don't know if there's that same energy in 2022.
Already, a Republican-led remapping in Georgia has effectively erased one Democratic House seat and made another vulnerable.
The challenges facing Democrats are cyclical and structural.
The Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill could scarcely be narrower.
The party in power almost always loses in a president's first midterm election, even absent the current overlapping national crises, some of which are beyond Biden's control.
I love that the New York Times has said, it's not Biden's fault.
It's not Biden's fault, but it's a little Biden's fault.
Inside the White House, This political operation has been a subject of quiet griping in some corners for months.
A furious effort is afoot to reframe 2022 as a choice between the two parties rather than a referendum on democratic rule.
I need it done?
Aggressive operator longtime Biden advisor has rejoined the administration to sharpen its messaging.
Yeah, she, Anita Dunn, most famous for putting like a Mao Christmas ornament on a Obama White House Christmas tree.
The Democratic base is quite demoralized at the moment.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of the party's leading progressive voices, put it bluntly, if Georgia was the scene of the highest highs for the Democrats in 2020, turning blue at the presidential level for the first time since 1992, flipping two Senate seats, it's not clear whether the ideologically sprawling and multiracial Biden coalition they unified to oust Trump is replicable.
This fall, Warnock is expected to face Hershel Walker, the Republican former football star with scant political experience.
Warnock has already begun leveraging a $23 million war chest to tell voters he feels their pain and to show that he doesn't know what the hell he's doing.
He literally says in one of his ads, I'm not a magician.
Don't blame me.
In the Republican race for governor, Brian Kemp, who is going to win his primary with David Perdue, is going to skunk Stacey Abrams.
According to the New York Times, they say Ms.
Abrams has emerged as a national star among Democrats.
But privately, Democratic strategists fear her high watermark might have come in 2018, when she lost in a Democratic wave year.
Most polling shows a close race for governor and Senate with a slight Republican advantage.
So good luck to Democrats in all of this.
They're trying to spin their way out of this and it isn't going particularly well.
National Economic Council Chair Brian Deese, who's become a regular staple on cable news now because they have to trot somebody out to try and justify this debacle, economically speaking.
He was asked specifically on CNN whether the United States can avoid a recession and he dodged the question.
Yes or no, is the U.S.
falling into a recession?
Well, there are always risks, but here's where I think we are.
Our economy is in a transition from what has been the strongest recovery in modern American history to what can be a period of more stable and resilient growth that works better for families.
And so if we keep our focus on bringing inflation down in a way that actually helps families... But you're not saying no?
Look, there are always risks, but we feel very good about where the United States is, particularly when you look on the global landscape.
So that is not a no.
That is not a no.
Meanwhile, Bash asked me, so how did you guys blow it on inflation?
And he really didn't have a good answer on that one either.
Let's talk about inflation.
It is still near the highest levels in four decades.
Brian, how did the administration get that so wrong?
Look, a lot of things have changed over the course of the last year, and we've dealt with a lot of unexpected challenges.
As I mentioned, the Delta wave of COVID, Omicron on top of that, and more recently, Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which has sent gyration through global energy markets.
It's all Putin.
It's Ukraine.
It's a bunch of stuff that we never could have expected.
Like future variants that everyone expected.
Nobody is going to buy this, which is why David Axelrod, former Obama advisor, he's out there being like, yeah, they're jacked.
I mean, just 2022 is going to be a hideous red wave.
It's going to be a tsunami.
Just get ready for it.
Batten down the hatches.
Inflation is hard to reverse.
The Fed has the major cudgel here, but that involves raising interest rates, which has its own problems.
There are other things you could do, like relative to tariffs or student loans that would be unpopular.
I mean, there really aren't a lot of tools here for him, and that's what makes this so uncomfortable.
Yeah, sad story here for the Democrats.
So they're talking about kind of throwing everything in the world against the wall.
And they're talking about, they'll talk abortion, or they'll talk racism, or they'll talk about ending student loans, student loan debt, or they'll talk about how Republicans are going to steal elections if you don't elect Democrats to steal elections, because after all, Democrats have not been too shy about their desire to rig elections by rigging the rule.
None of this is going to pay off.
None of this is going to pay off.
So it's all baked into the cake at this point.
Joe Biden is in serious trouble.
Now, Republicans can still blow it because Republicans are very good at blowing things.
They can have a bunch of candidates who say dumb stuff.
They can lose a couple of Senate seats because Republican candidates say really stupid stuff.
But overall, Democrats are in a world of hurt here.
They know they are in a world of hurt here.
And they are just preparing for the shellacking to come.
So everybody should.
All right, 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.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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A new pandemic drops just in time for the midterms.
The Archbishop of San Francisco denies communion to Nancy Pelosi.
And Hispanics flee from the Democrats' sinking ship.
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