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June 23, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:26
Joe Biden’s Gas Problem | Ep. 1521
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Time Text
Joe Biden tries to push a gas tax holiday to combat high prices at the pump.
But even some Democrats aren't biting.
Fed chair Jerome Powell admits a recession may be on the way.
And the New York Times completely botches the data on how mass shooters are stopped.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Joe Biden, I keep saying it because it's true.
He's in serious, serious trouble.
If you look at his poll numbers, they are just awful.
The latest Quinnipiac poll has him overall at 33% approval rating.
33% approval rating.
It's like basically Joe Biden's immediate family and people who work directly for the Democratic Party and members of the media.
But I repeat myself three times over there.
His approval ratings by group are horrifyingly bad.
Among men, he has a 27% approval rating.
Among women, he has a 39% approval rating.
Among independents, he has a 25% approval rating.
Among those with no college degree, 24% approval rating.
Apparently, college makes you dumber because 43% of people who went to college, a four-year college, apparently approve of Joe Biden.
But even that is 43 versus 50.
Among white Americans, 31% approval rating.
Among black Americans, where Democrats are normally in the 80s or 90s, he's down to 59% approval rating.
And among Hispanics, it's even lower than among whites, which, by the way, is now a consistent result.
Joe Biden is underperforming among Hispanics worse than he is among whites in nearly every poll that has been performed over the last several months, which demonstrates full scale that the Democratic dream of a multiracial coalition that was going to unite against the white superstructure.
All of that was a lie.
It was not true.
It turns out people don't predominantly think of themselves as members of a race.
They think of themselves as individuals with actual priorities.
And that's obviously true for Hispanics in America, who are shifting in large numbers toward the Republican Party.
Even among 18 to 34 year olds, that is Biden's kind of key constituency.
That is a very liberal constituency.
He has a 25% approval rating.
Again, this is according to Quinnipiac.
Those are horrible, horrible numbers for Joe Biden.
And he keeps doubling down on this stuff.
I mean, I can't point it out enough.
This is a president who came into office with a 60% approval rating and a mandate to be a moderate who was dead.
And instead, he decided to be, yes, kind of dead, but more like a zombie Bernie Sanders.
He's going to wander around the earth seeking brains and also pushing socialistic, idiotic, racialist policy.
Which is why in the middle of what appears to be a recession, it appears as though we are currently in it.
As I've said before, when people say we're not in a recession, recessions are retrospective.
You are only officially in a recession after you are in it.
Meaning you have to have two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
We already had one.
And we're not going to find out if we're in a second quarter of negative growth until probably next month.
So we could be in the middle of it right now.
And by all available indicators, it seems like we probably are.
But Joe Biden keeps doubling down.
The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating piece today talking about how Joe Biden now wants to destroy the Federal Reserve.
So the Federal Reserve, which is the thing he is relying upon to take the sting out of inflation by raising the interest rates.
He's relying on Jerome Powell to do all of his economic policy at this point.
He wants the Federal Reserve to pump up the money supply when he wants spending to be higher.
And then when inflation runs out of control, he wants the Federal Reserve to come in and lower the spending by increasing the interest rates.
Except now, Joe Biden's administration is trying to add a third priority to the Federal Reserve.
So the Federal Reserve has two priorities.
One is to keep inflation low.
The other is to keep unemployment low.
Those are the two stated priorities of the Federal Reserve.
Now, I've always argued that this is a bad idea.
I don't know why the Federal Reserve is in charge of employment data.
That makes no sense to me.
The Federal Reserve is in charge of the nation's monetary supply.
It is not their job to pump up the money or pump down the money, depending on what the unemployment rate is.
It's their job to provide a stable currency.
Hey, but we do have this dual mission for the Federal Reserve, keep unemployment low and keep inflation low.
But now Joe Biden wants to add a third priority.
What is the third priority?
Equity, equity, because equity has to be infused into all of our institutions.
Equity, of course, means doing the inefficient thing for purposes of racial redistribution.
According to the Wall Street Journal, President Biden recently promised in these pages not to interfere with the Federal Reserve.
Yet last week, he endorsed a House bill that would add racial equity to the Fed's dual mandate of price stability and full employment.
How does the White House square this contradiction?
The House bill passed last week 215 to 207 with little media notice, but it deserves special attention because it reveals how the Biden administration and Democrats plan to politicize monetary policy and financial regulation.
Recall that candidate Biden advocated making reducing racial disparities a third monetary mandate.
You have to wonder if one reason the Fed was slow to tighten the policy was because the central bankers agreed with him.
Several federal open market committee members promoted the idea of inclusive employment, even as inflation began to creep up.
Now, House Democrats want to codify racial equity as part of the Fed's mandate.
Remember, racial equity does not mean equality.
Equality means everybody gets treated the same by the law.
Racial equity means we look at the results of policy, and if there is disparate impact among racial groups, we then adjust.
Basically, the Federal Reserve becomes the great guarantor of of fairness of the universe, of cosmic justice, which of course should not be their job because that shouldn't be anybody's job because that is not the way statistics actually work.
But this bill would direct the Fed to include race in monetary policy, the operation of payment systems, the supervision of banks and non-banks deemed by the Financial Stability Oversight Council to be systemically important.
Now, it should be important to recognize here that it was because we injected race into, for example, the mortgage system, that we ended up with the 2007-2008 financial crash.
That is because Bill Clinton decided that it was very, very important that the Community Reinvestment Act Make it easier for people who were not qualified to take out loans to take out subprime loans effectively guaranteed by the federal government that artificially inflated the real estate market.
And then when it turns out people who should not be getting loans got those loans and then they couldn't repay the loans.
And all those loans had been collateralized across the economy through things like credit derivative swaps.
It turns out that you can take down an entire multinational economy that way.
But now we're going to go right back to the drawing board.
And we're going to use the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to be a nonpartisan guarantor, again, of financial stability.
We're going to use that to cram down bad policy that innately undermines all of this, that undermines financial stability.
David Henderson and Casey Mulligan have a good piece over at the Wall Street Journal today titled, Biden is Practically Engineering a Recession.
They say, a recession is sometimes defined as a decrease in employment.
Other times it's defined as a reduction in real gross domestic product for two quarters or more.
Strong labor force and productivity growth are supply-side factors that make a recession less likely, as is recovery from the pandemic.
But increased regulation and increased taxation of capital, two Biden administration policy priorities, are supply-side headwinds that make recession more likely.
And that is exactly what Joe Biden is doing.
He's talking about taxing capital at a higher rate and increasing regulation.
GDP and productivity levels were exaggerated during the pandemic as many goods were unavailable or low in quality in ways the GDP data didn't capture that right.
Even though public school teachers stayed home, for instance, national accountants assumed that they were as productive as ever, merely because they were continuing to be paid.
As they get back to traditional teaching, this won't be officially recognized as economic progress for the same reason the pandemic regress was never really acknowledged.
In normal years, workers' productivity rises by about 1%.
That alone is a strong economic tailwind causing GDP growth.
Making recession by the reduced GDP definition less likely than otherwise.
Unfortunately, Mr. Biden's economic policies will likely cause productivity growth to fall.
A 2020 analysis by one of us, Mr. Mulligan, and three co-authors concluded Biden's economic agenda would cause full-time equivalent employment per capita to be 3.1% lower than otherwise and real GDP per capita to be 8.5% lower than otherwise.
If that effect were spread over five years, the reductions relative to baseline growth would be 0.6% and 1.7% a year, respectively.
That by itself makes a recession likely in one of those five years.
And he continues to push taxes.
He continues to push regulations.
And the impact on Americans is obvious to see.
Everywhere from your food prices to your gas.
And Joe Biden doesn't have any real fix to this because to have a real fix to these problems would require him to completely shift his policy priorities.
Joe Biden continues to promote the idea that what we see in an increased gas price is some sort of massive opportunity.
So, for example, Joe Biden is talking about how he's going to solve these problems by spending $100 billion in public transit to take cars off the road.
It's clip five.
And here he is trying to explain this.
We're already building secure supply chains to build these electric vehicles here in America.
And we're investing almost $100 billion in public transit and rail.
For all the studies show that it will take millions of cars off the road and significantly reduce pollution if there's a serious transportation system available.
We're going to take down those gas prices by spending $100 billion over the course of years in order to take cars off the road with public transit.
You will be taking a bus, my friend.
You.
I don't care where you live.
You can be in L.A.
where the urban sprawl is just insane, and you might live 45 minutes from work by car, but you will be on a subway to nowhere, according to Joe Biden.
We're going to build a high-speed rail from Sacramento to L.A.
We're going to spend $100 billion.
Okay, so even assuming that would work, which it absolutely will not, It's just not going to work.
There are certain cities that are just not built for public transport.
They're not.
They're too far.
They're too spread out.
People are in different areas of the city.
It doesn't work that way.
But let's assume for a second that it did work.
You think that $100 billion investment is going to come online like today?
You think that it's going to bring down the price of gas today?
It's going to make society more livable today?
Not even close.
It's just he's the guy from The Simpsons singing the monorail song to you.
But don't worry, he has other ideas.
So his new idea to bring down the gas tax is to bring down gas prices by suspending the gas tax.
Now, this is sort of the equivalent of that time.
You remember last year, it was around July 4th, that his administration tweeted out like a 16 cent decrease in the price of a July 4th meal.
Like, ooh, look at us.
We are bringing down the cost of living.
And then, of course, over the course of the next year, the price of that meal doubled.
So now Joe Biden is doing this with gas.
So according to the White House, they are now calling for a three month federal gas tax holiday.
So this is unbelievably stupid.
It's number one stupid because it runs directly up against his own policy priorities.
So I thought the idea from these jokers was we need a global carbon tax in order to cut down on emissions.
But the minute the gas price rises, he's like, let's let's stop taxing people.
Okay, fair enough.
Maybe you should just stop taxing people.
I don't know.
Here's an idea.
What if we just stopped the gas tax entirely?
I know.
Crazy, right?
Like forever.
But no.
But here's what makes this incredibly politically stupid.
See, I own a calendar.
I know.
It was expensive.
And I'm looking at that calendar right now.
And what it's telling me is that it's currently June of 2022.
Joe Biden is calling for a three-month federal gas tax holiday.
If that were implemented, that would mean July, August, September.
It would expire in October.
Like four weeks out from a midterm election.
So you'd have the gas price increase because of the expiration of the gas tax holiday one month before the election.
Because Joe Biden is not with us.
Not particularly smart.
Well, all of this suggests that probably we shouldn't trust the federal government with the future of our money.
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The White House put out a statement.
They said the price of gas is up dramatically around the world and by almost $2 per gallon in America since Putin began amassing troops on the border of Ukraine.
Yeah, this is all about Putin, of course, despite the fact that the gas prices have been increasing dramatically since literally the day Joe Biden took office.
President Biden understands that high gas prices pose a significant challenge for working families.
That's why he has taken action in recent months to boost the supply of oil and gas, including a historic release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which brought down gas prices by like nothing, actually.
And encouraging oil companies and refiners to boost capacities and output to get more supply on the market.
By encouraging oil companies and refiners to boost capacity, they mean Joe Biden yelled at people.
Joe Biden got on the phone, he's like, hey, Jack, I need you to boost the oil and gas in Magdalene.
And they were like, well, Mr. President, your policies are preventing people from investing in our industry because you have said repeatedly and continue to say that you wish our industry to go defunct.
And Joe Biden's like, yeah, pony soldier, let me just tell you, that was a Zip magazine name.
Well, that's not going to increase the supply of oil.
There are no refiners coming online because of people like Joe Biden.
So what is Joe Biden calling for?
He's saying the federal government charges an $0.18 tax per gallon of gasoline and $0.24 tax per gallon of diesel.
Those taxes fund critical highways and public transportation through the Highway Trust Fund.
But in this unique moment, with gas prices near $5 a gallon on average across the country, President Biden is calling on Congress to suspend the gas tax for three months until the end of September to give Americans a little extra breathing room as they deal with the effects of Putin's war on Ukraine.
If you just say it often enough, it's like Tinkerbell.
If you just clap, then this narrative will live again.
It'll just rise.
The President is also calling on Congress to make sure that a gas tax holiday has no negative effect on the Highway Trust Fund.
Why?
You can have your cake and eat it too, says Monorailman, with our deficit already down by a historic $1.6 trillion this year.
The deficit is not down because of Joe Biden.
The deficit is down, if it's down at all, because we blew out the spending in 2020-2021, and then some of that spending expired.
When he says the deficit is down, what he means is that you, on a personal level, you exceeded your credit limit by $2,000 last month.
This month, you only exceeded your credit limit by $1,000.
My goodness, you brought down the deficit by $1,000.
Congratulations to you.
This is consistent with legislation proposed in the Senate and House to advance a responsible gas tax holiday.
Joe Biden understands a gas tax holiday alone will not, on its own, relieve the run-up in costs we've seen.
But the president believes that at this unique moment, when the war in Ukraine is imposing costs on American men, he's just going to beat that dead horse.
He's going to beat that horse until it is pulp.
It's all about Putin, and it's all about Ukraine.
It is not all about Putin.
It is not all about Ukraine.
It is because of you and your bad policies that have decreased the supply of oil and gas over the course of decades.
You literally announced in the middle of the campaign you wanted there to be no more oil production.
And so they put out this dumb fact sheet.
And then Congress is like, yeah, we're not going to do that because that's really stupid.
Even some Democrats are saying we're not particularly interested in this end to the gas tax because we understand that it's not actually going to accomplish anything.
But that's not going to stop Joe Biden.
By the way, how dumb is this idea?
Circa 2008, Barack Obama was decrying the idea of a gas tax holiday when there was a gas spike in the middle of the recession of 2007-2008.
Like, this is a gimmick.
That's it.
Mm-hmm.
Yes.
I know that we're having a debate right now about the gas tax holiday.
For us to suggest that 30 cents a day for three months is real relief, that that's a real energy policy, means that we are not tackling the problem that has to be tackled.
We are offering gimmicks.
When we're offering the same thing that John McCain's offering on the cheap, that means we're not presenting a truthful response to the challenges that we face in America.
We can do better than that this time.
We can do better.
By the way, his version of we can do better is let's fund green energy and completely decrease the supply of oil and natural gas until our asses get saved by the fracking bros up in Pennsylvania and Texas.
Which is exactly what happened with America's oil and gas supply.
No thanks to Barack Obama.
And now, House and Senate Democrats are like, we're not going to do this.
Even they are looking at this and they're like, we're not going to do this.
But that's not going to stop Joe Biden.
Joe Biden's going to yell at the moon.
Like Grandpa Simpson, he's just going to yell at things.
So my favorite part of this is where he starts yelling.
He did a press conference yesterday.
And at this press conference, he yelled at the gas stations.
He's like driving past an Exxon station.
and he's like, lower the, bring it down, bring it down, this one.
Yeah.
And I love the optics.
I just, I love the optics of how he does these things.
And it's worth noting, behind him is a picture of a, of one of the billboards that you see at a gas station, right?
There's a sign that shows the prices.
And then behind him is a, are three words, lower gas prices.
Like as though he's going to hypnotize the gas stations and no longer their prices, despite the fact that he has restricted their ability to increase supply.
I mean, honestly, the guy, the ads against this guy cut themselves.
All you have to do is show this screen of Joe Biden with the slogan, lower gas prices behind him.
And then a clip of him saying that he doesn't want to produce any more oil.
Like this is, this is, this is child's play.
Here was Joe Biden yelling at gas stations.
A strategy, if ever I've heard one.
My message is simple.
To the companies running gas stations and setting those prices at the pump.
This is a time of war.
Global peril.
Ukraine.
These are not normal times.
Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you are paying for the product.
Do it now.
Do it today.
Why aren't you?
Bring down the price.
So I look forward to him talking.
The sun requires a stern talking to you.
This whole global warming thing, I feel like it's very solvable if only the sun would listen to Joe Biden.
I mean, really, he could actually, like, do a dance.
He could go out in the streets, he could do a dance, maybe sacrifice a couple of goats, and talk to the sun about what's going on right now.
Why don't you lower your prices?
Well, maybe the reason they didn't lower their prices is because you've restricted the ability of refineries to operate in the United States.
Maybe it's because you have suggested that investment in any of these industries will be a complete fail because all of these industries are going to be put under the boot of the American government under people like Joe Biden.
Maybe that would be the problem.
So, you tell them not to produce more oil and gas, and then you undercut the ability for them to do this, and then you yell at them.
I'm sure this is going to work.
Just yelling at things is totally going to work.
Old man yells at you is a real interesting presidential strategy, Mr. President.
OK, then he tries this other gambit.
He tries to pretend that we don't understand what's going on.
So he says, well, you know, if you are upset with the high price of gas, that's just because you want Putin to win.
Um, so I would just like to point out at this point that Putin invaded Ukraine in large measure because Joe Biden signaled to Vladimir Putin that the United States would not act with alacrity if he did so.
Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in the first place because we pulled out of Afghanistan and handed over a country with whom we were allied, a government with whom we were allied.
We handed it over to a bunch of 8th century barbarians who rape women and keep them in bags in the basement.
Because of him.
And Vladimir Putin looked at that and said, this is a weak horse and I will try to take Ukraine.
So combine the fact that the Ukrainian invasion is at least partially the responsibility of a president of the United States who's so weak on the world stage that Vladimir Putin looked him down and said, I'm going to just take this country right in front of you.
Combine that with the fact that Joe Biden and his administration have backed, politically, the destruction of the American oil and natural gas industry as a matter of utopian policy.
And then he's telling you that it's your fault that the gas prices are high?
That you want Putin to win?
By the way, worth noting here, Putin is raking in the money off oil and natural gas hand over fist.
Hand over fist right now.
Because he's selling it to India, he's selling it to China.
The fact that there's undersupply in the West is why Putin is still able to support his war.
Your garbage green policy.
This is what happens when you outsource your energy and economic policy to a 17-year-old, whiny, Swedish, scoldy teenager.
How dare you?
She says, how dare you?
And you start jumping for the, oh, well, I guess we better not pump any gas anymore.
I mean, otherwise, Greta would be very angry with us.
Oh, oh, she'll yell at us.
And she'll be very scoldy.
She'll take her boat over here across the ocean.
Oh, no.
And then you, and then you blame us?
You blame us?
Try again.
Well, it turns out that outsourcing your energy policy to a school-dy Swedish teen is a bad idea.
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Here's Joe Biden blaming you.
The gas prices are your fault.
For all those Republicans in Congress criticizing me today for high gas prices in America, are you now saying we were wrong to support Ukraine?
Are you saying we were wrong to stand up to Putin?
Are you saying that we would rather have lower gas prices in America and Putin's iron fist in Europe?
I don't believe that.
Okay, um, no.
What we are saying is that you have deliberately created policies that make it hard to produce more oil and refine more oil.
We are saying that your garbage foreign policy incentivized Vladimir Putin to miscalculate and invade Ukraine in the first place.
We are saying you have no exit plan from Ukraine.
All of these things are true.
You're gonna blame us?
And now they're doing the same thing with Joe Biden, but it ain't playing because here's the thing.
Barack Obama was good at this game.
Joe Biden is very bad at this game.
don't understand.
And the media would cheer, they would drool, they would drool and cheer.
And now they're doing the same thing with Joe Biden, but it ain't playing.
Because here's the thing, Barack Obama was good at this game.
Joe Biden is very bad at this game.
It turns out that when you wheel out the corpse of an 80-year-old man to mumble at you, and then he's gonna yell at you.
Or whisper at you?
Or whisper yell at you?
That doesn't change policies, it doesn't change minds, and it doesn't convince anyone.
I'm amazed at the level of whistling past the graveyard, almost literally, for this administration.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the untalented press secretary who replaced the more talented but similarly dishonest Jen Psaki.
She said yesterday, guys, you know what?
We're good.
Lowering that gas tax is going to be a little long.
We're going to be great.
He sees this as an opportunity, a straightforward, simple way to deal with the pain that the American people is dealing with, giving them some relief at the pump.
That's what we're talking about.
It's straightforward.
It's simple.
The president would like Congress to act.
We're talking about, you know, 18 cents per gallon, which is going to go a long way.
If you look at the average of states, that's 30 cents.
Just looking at those two things, that's almost 50 cents.
That's going to go a long way for three months.
That's it.
Three months.
Oh, wow.
I mean, for three months, we're going to lower your average at the pump by 18 cents.
Well, I mean, color me satisfied.
Sounds great to me.
I mean, that means that over the course of a month, I might save 10 bucks over the course of a month, thanks to her.
That's gonna...
You're solving all my problems, lady.
Meanwhile, you got Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell saying, well, you know, they keep blaming Ukraine for inflation.
Remember, it was Joe Biden and company who just did this.
I mean, the entire White House press release about the gas taxes, Putin-Ukraine, Putin-Ukraine, Ukraine-Putin.
And Jerome Powell is asked, so what's driving the inflation?
Is it Putin-Ukraine?
Jerome Powell's like, no.
Given how inflation has escalated over the past 18 months, would you say that the word Ukraine is the primary driver of inflation in America?
No, inflation was high before, certainly before the war in Ukraine broke out.
Oh, well that's, oh, well, uh, well that's awkward.
That's awkward, isn't it?
Jennifer Granholm, the Energy Secretary, she was asked about this, because of course she has also been claiming that it's Putin's price hike and all the rest of this garbage, and she's like, yeah, I didn't, you know, I never heard Powell say that, so he must not have said it, says Jennifer Granholm.
I didn't hear what he said on that, but I think most people acknowledge that the price of fuel is a big driver of inflation.
And in fact, they've put large percentages on it.
And so we know that the war in Ukraine, having driven up the price of fuel because it crimps supply, it's a total supply and demand question.
She's an expert in supply and demand, Jennifer Granholm, which is why she keeps insisting that if you just keep buying electric cars, then it's going to solve the crisis.
By the way, good luck on buying an electric car.
I ordered a Tesla like a year ago and it still hasn't arrived.
The supply chain problems have not alleviated.
So thanks again to this wonderful administration.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve now tasked with the unenviable policy of having to achieve racial equity, low inflation, and low unemployment.
We're just going to put that out there.
Why don't we just make Jerome Powell emperor of the universe?
Seriously, I mean, if he can control all those things, why do we even have an elected government?
I don't even know.
I mean, these are like the most important things, right?
Racial equity and low inflation and low unemployment.
Why do we even bother having a legislature?
We don't even need a president.
We just need this guy, Jerome Powell.
Well, the problem is that when you give all power to somebody like Jerome Powell to control the giant levers of the American government, it didn't turn out that great.
Because this guy was responsible for the inflation of the American economy to the point where we have 40-year high inflation.
Then we left him in charge, which is just amazing to me.
I mean, this is, you hired an Uber driver.
He promptly drove the car off a cliff.
You're in the backseat.
He drove a car off the cliff.
Somehow you survive.
And he survived.
But the car is completely wrecked at the bottom.
And then you're like, man, I don't have a car anymore.
I still have to get to where I'm going.
Can I hire you to drive me?
That's pretty much what we did with Jerome Powell and company over at the Federal Reserve.
So, Jerome Powell yesterday was testifying in front of Congress, like, we're not trying to create a recession, but I mean, honestly, we can't really be sure we won't.
Well, that's encouraging.
Thank you, Jerome.
On the inflation side, we're very far from our target.
So we think that we have to restore price stability to put the economy back in a place where in the medium and longer term we can have a sustained period of what we would call maximum employment.
So that's how we're thinking about it.
We're not trying to provoke and don't think that we will need to provoke a recession, but we do think it's absolutely essential that we restore price stability, really for the benefit of the labor market as much as anything else.
So, by the way, the S&P 500 took this ill.
So yesterday, the S&P 500 and the Dow went down after Powell talked to Congress because everybody's like, oh no.
According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S.
stocks edged lower Wednesday after Jerome Powell acknowledged the central bank's rate-raising campaign could cause an economic downturn.
By the way, Powell keeps blaming demand.
He keeps saying, well, you know, it's just too high demand that's driving inflation.
It's not the fact that we printed the money.
Jerome?
I noticed that the demand started to increase dramatically when you started printing the money.
These two things are interrelated.
Here is the Federal Reserve Chair.
Both factors are principally at work here.
You couldn't get this kind of high inflation without strong demand, and you certainly couldn't get it without the kind of supply issues that we've had, both in the labor market, reflected in high wages, and then in the goods market, reflected in what's happened with Durable goods and cars in particular you look there.
There's a it's been this driven by semiconductor shortage Okay.
Meanwhile, Karine Jean-Pierre is basically, so the Biden administration again, it's their bad economic policy that has helped cause all of this, but they're telling you about all the good things they're doing for you.
Like they say, you know, no one's been, no one's had to pay a single dime of student loans under this president.
Oh, right.
Because you mean that, um, for the last several years, we have been illegally postponing the ability of people to actually get their loans paid off.
Like we did that based on a pandemic that is no longer a major factor in American life.
And this administration keeps pushing it.
They just keep telling us how good we have it, and I've noticed that no one believes it.
We're still continuing.
The President, the administration, to assess options of cancellation.
We have not made a decision yet.
As the President said just recently, I think on Sunday, he expects to make a decision on that soon.
I do want to add, no one has been required to pay a single dime of student loans since the President took office, which is 41 million borrows, provided 20 billion in targeted debt relief to 1.3, They're just going to tell you how great you have it.
In essence, they're going to say the same thing that the Washington Post's Michelle Singletary said yesterday on national TV.
She was saying, you know what?
You're all whining about inflation.
You're all whining about your costs.
You're all whining about the fact that the economy seems to be sinking like the Titanic after it struck an iceberg.
You know what?
You guys never had it so good.
Everything is fine.
Shut up.
There are Americans who did extremely well in the last two years in the market.
You still have your job.
And yeah, it's costing you more for gas, but guess what?
You are still going to take that holiday, that 4th of July vacation.
You could still eat out.
So I'm going to need you to calm down and back off because it feeds into this fear.
And then this fear feeds into people making decisions that creates the very thing that they're fearful of.
And if you're in that category, calm down.
Calm down guys.
Everything is fine.
Everything.
Well, here's the thing.
Democrats are in a position of electoral responsibility.
They are not following along with the media's playbook here.
So Joe Manchin, who is a Democrat in a Republican state, a very Republican state, a state in which Joe Biden's approval rating is beneath that of cancer.
Joe Manchin, he's now saying, build back better is gone, man.
You think I'm going to vote for any of Joe Biden's major policy priorities at this point?
Yeah, try again.
By the way, he's been saying this for a year and the media keep going back to him.
Joe, are you going to change your mind?
No, he's not going to change his mind.
What would make him change his mind?
Joe Biden's massive popularity?
We're not going to spend any more money, I can assure you that.
We've spent enough.
We're $30.5 trillion of debt.
We've got to get our debt under control.
If you want to get inflation under control, control your debt.
Are you and Leader Schumer still talking about Build Back Better?
No, I talked to everybody.
You talked to everybody, but specifically about Build Back Better?
No, Build Back Better is gone.
There's no Build Back Better, it's gone.
Well, that sad trombone is the sound of the Biden administration.
You know, Mark Kelly, who's running in Arizona for re-election.
Again, he's running in a state where Joe Biden's approval ratings are really low.
Kelly has to sort of run as a Kyrsten Sinema knockoff if he wishes to retain his seat.
And so now he's running directly against Joe Biden.
When you've got Democrats running directly against their own president, that is never a particularly good sign for the White House.
Arizona families are facing tough choices, like how to fill the gas tank and the grocery cart.
And things people count on can be hard to find.
We can't afford to wait this out.
So I'm pushing for solutions today, even if it means taking on my own party.
Like bringing down gas prices by allowing more domestic oil production, temporarily ending the gas tax, and cutting red tape to restock shelves faster.
I'm Mark Kelly, and I approve this message because I'll do whatever it takes to lower costs now.
Okay, so that is Mark Kelly running directly against his own party.
Things are going just fantastically for the Democrats.
By the way, quick note on a Democrat for whom the media now mourns.
That'd be Andrew Gillum.
Remember that time that Andrew Gillum was a rising star in the Democratic Party?
So among the rising stars the media have chosen in the Democratic Party over the past few years are Stacey Abrams, who lied for several years about being governor of Georgia.
You have Beto O'Rourke, who has now lost every position up to and including dog catcher that he has run for.
He is running out of New Mexican dirt to eat after his defeat.
And Andrew Gillum, who, by the way, narrowly, narrowly lost, I mean really narrowly, like by 30,000 votes, lost an election to Ron DeSantis.
Think how different the state of Florida and the nation would be if Andrew Gillum had actually won that race promoted by the media.
He was an extremist on every issue from economics to foreign policy.
And he has spent the last several years demonstrating full scale why the media cannot be trusted to pick your favorite candidates.
Because as it turns out, Andrew Gillum has spent the last few years, since running for governor, being caught in a hotel room with an overdosed gay escort and meth.
And now, being federally indicted for fraud, according to Axios, Gillum was indicted Wednesday on 21 counts connected to campaign wire fraud.
The indictment alleges that Gillum and co-defendant Sharon Letman-Hicks conspired to commit wire fraud in connection with a scheme to divert donations back to Gillum for personal use, per a Justice Department press release.
Now, you'll remember that during this time, there were serious, like when he was being elected, when there were questions about the election, there were serious questions that were being asked about bribery and wire fraud and all the rest.
And all of his defenders are like, it's just Hamilton tickets.
I mean, what are you so worried about Hamilton tickets for?
Well, now it turns out that he's under a federal indictment.
Their alleged efforts, which took place between 2016 and 2019, included diverting some funds the pair solicited to a company owned by Letman Hicks via third parties and channeling them in the form of payroll payments to Gillum.
Gillum and Letman Hicks have been charged with 19 counts of wire fraud.
Gillum has been charged with making false statements to the FBI.
The defendants face a maximum of 20 years in prison for charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, 20 years for wire fraud, five years for making false statements.
So, once again, well done on the media picking only the best.
They care about you, folks.
It's not that they have their priorities.
They care about you.
And they only objectively pick the best candidates to back.
All right, in just one second, we'll get to gun control.
The Republicans are now joining the gun control push, at least in mild part.
But they're being promoted by a media that is just lying to you.
We'll get to that in a second.
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Well folks, June has been a massive month already here at The Daily Wire.
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You remember that she was cancelled by Disney and then we uncancelled her because that kind of crap don't stand in Daily Wire world.
We're not the only ones who feel like Now Gina is uncancellable.
Yesterday in an op-ed for the Daily Mail, Meghan McCain praised Gina for her fearlessness in defying the corporate Hollywood snake and joining us in our fight to claim back the culture.
Meghan actually writes, quote, The Daily Wire have created a new avenue for artists that have the financial and audience backing to allow them to create on their own terms to Gina.
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So the gun control push is in full swing, despite the fact that we now know that the Uvalde situation, the Uvalde mass shooting was almost completely the fault of local police responding in the most derelict and disgusting fashion I think anyone has ever seen.
We now know that they were there for like 12 minutes between the time that this person, the shooter, crashed his car and the time he entered the school, and they were unable to prevent him from entering the school.
Once he was in the school, they could have gone to the door.
Instead, they waited for an hour and 14 minutes.
It's a mess.
But the media have their gun control agenda, and they're going to push it no matter what.
And they're going to do so with really kind of bizarre data points.
So there's an article in the New York Times on the front page of the website of the New York Times.
It was titled, Who Stops a Bad Guy with a Gun?
This article is wildly misleading.
So they show a chart.
It says how 433 active shooting attacks ended.
So they say 249 attacks ended before the police arrived.
148 and 184 attacks ended after the police arrived.
And then they break that down further.
So for the 184 attacks that ended after the police arrived, according to the New York Times, in 131, the police shot the attacker 98 times and subdued the attacker another 33 times.
In 53, the attacker died by suicide 38 times and surrendered 15 times.
Okay, but what they want you to focus on is the 249 attacks that ended before the police arrived.
They want to say that the majority of mass shootings ended before the police arrived, which just goes to show you that gun control is the solution.
Because if the solution to a mass shooting is either the cops or a bystander with a gun, Then this means that the proper solution is for people who are responsible to have guns.
They're trying to convince you that what's actually happening here is that mass shooters are basically just kind of giving up.
They're just like, you know, we're done.
So, this chart shows 249 attacks ended before the police arrived.
In 185, the attacker left the scene 113 times and died by suicide 72 times.
scene 113 times and died by suicide 72 times. In 64, a bystander subdued the attacker 42 times and shot the attacker 22 times. Okay, so what they are saying is that about 180, it's the 185 figure they want you to focus on, that the attacker either committed suicide or left the scene for no reason.
There's only, and the idea here again, the title of this article is who stops a bad guy with a gun.
And what they're saying is the only thing stopping a bad guy with a gun is the bad guy.
It's not a good guy with a gun.
It's not the threat of a good guy with a gun.
It's the bad guy himself, which demonstrates that if the bad guy didn't have a gun, then this stuff would not occur in the first place.
Now, granted that if I had a magic wand and every bad person in the United States couldn't get a gun, I'd go for it.
It sounds great.
Every criminal and prospective criminal, if I had the minority report power to predict in full who is going to commit a mass shooting and wave my wand, and those people would not only not have guns, I mean, we know there are going to be mass shooters, they just end up in prison, then great.
Sounds fantastic.
Ability does not exist, nor is that ability constitutional or in consonance with individual rights.
So, the question becomes, what is the best tailored policy?
The New York Times puts out these stats, and the stats are gimmicked.
This is jerry-rigged statistics here.
Here's why I say this.
Because when you actually dig down, what you see, here's what they say.
They say police officers shoot or physically subdue the shooter in less than one-third of attacks.
And then they give some examples of this sort of stuff.
And then they say bystanders stop some attackers more often with physical force than with a gun.
And then they say one in four attacks ends with a shooter's suicide.
And then they say one in four attackers leaves the scene, though most are later caught.
And this is where you start to see them gaming the system.
Quote, about a quarter of shootings ended when the attacker or attackers stopped of their own accord and left the scene.
Then were apprehended or died by suicide in another location.
Well, you know, they just decide, what?
You think they just decided to be nice people that day?
That's what happened.
They murdered a bunch of kids and then they just are like, you know what?
I'm done here, I guess.
I guess I'm just done here.
Many attacks that end when the shooter flees are spontaneous.
For example, one may stem from a dispute that escalates when one party pulls out a gun.
In San Antonio in 2019, a man had a disagreement with the staff of a moving company, then opened fire on the company's workers before running away.
The police apprehended him later without incident.
Last year, a man who was kicked out of a nightclub in Wichita, Kansas after a fight, returned and shot six people, killing one.
He fled the scene.
Police arrested him a month later in Phoenix.
Many premeditated attacks also ended when the attacker or attackers left the scene.
After a gunman shot 34 people in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, he dropped his weapon and fled the school with other students, bypassing police officers who had arrived on the scene but had not yet attempted to intervene.
In El Paso, a gunman shot 45 people, killing 23 in a Walmart before fleeing the scene.
The police arrested him down the road without incident.
Why attackers stop themselves is a hard thing to know, says one expert.
But after studying years of shooters, he has some guesses.
One is that sometimes shooters plan a dramatic confrontation with the police that doesn't happen.
Another possibility is that the reality of their action sets in.
Or is it possible they think the police are showing up and they want to leave before the police show up?
And the possibility of a threat of a gun ending an attack seems completely foreign to the New York Times.
And this is something that advocates of the Second Amendment have long said.
The whole point of a gun is to never use it.
That is the point of a gun.
Even in confrontations with bad guys.
It's not a good guy with a gun shoots a bad guy with a gun and stops him.
That's last resort.
The typical idea is that the threat of a good guy with a gun stops the bad guy with a gun.
This is why, for example, heavy police presence in high-crime areas tends to prevent crime.
Are those people voluntary?
According to the New York Times, that would just be people voluntarily giving up crime.
I mean, they never had a confrontation with the police.
Or is it possible that when you have more people with guns to intimidate the people who would do bad things, they don't do the bad things?
And the New York Times is falsifying the stats by suggesting that people magically and randomly just decide to commit suicide or leave the scene of a mass shooting just through the goodness of their own heart.
You can see this throughout this dumb article where they're slicing, and this is just a clear misclassification.
And they're doing it on purpose.
They're clearly doing it on purpose.
And they give another example, right?
One of the examples they use is pretty amazing, right?
So they're talking about, in more than a quarter of episodes, the attackers ended the shootings by turning the guns on themselves.
After shooting 471 people at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas from a hotel room overlooking the festival, the gunman died by suicide before the police arrived to his room.
By the way, before the police arrived to his room is a pretty relative term.
They were running up the stairwell like he knew they were coming.
His guns jammed and he knew they were coming.
That's why he committed suicide.
But the idea here is that we have to pretend now that gunmen actually are just sort of randomly stopping.
So the only thing that actually stops a bad guy with a gun is a bad guy with a gun as opposed to a good guy with a gun or the possibility of a good guy with a gun.
That's really dumb and it's really dishonest.
And it just shows you how you can play, you really can play havoc with statistics so long as you are willing to deliberately misclassify things.
And you see the media just drawing wrong conclusions, deliberately incorrect conclusions from bad statistical calibration.
This is a perfect example of it.
It's literally on the front page of the New York Times website today.
It's supposed to tell you that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is gun control regulation.
It is not true.
Even in the data that they are citing.
The vast majority of the time, it is the threat of a person with a gun...
Either the authorities or a bystander that causes someone to either flee or to commit suicide.
It is never these people just deciding, you know what?
I'm a good person now, and I've decided I'm done today.
All right.
We'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Muller Show.
Today, he discusses Pfizer, suggesting an annual COVID shot.
You can hear more details about this story over on Michael's show that is available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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