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July 18, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:58
The Twilight of The Elite Ruling Class | Ep. 1536
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After promising that their expertise would guide Americans through economic hardship, foreign policy chaos, and global pandemics, the experts have destroyed their own credibility, but still insist you mimic their values.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Well, you may have noticed that the experts are not really great on the economy.
One thing that they are constantly saying is that, you know, that you should trust them when it comes to inflation and the dollar, and then they just kind of blow it every which way.
So right now, the value of the dollar is really strong, but five minutes ago, the value of the dollar was not nearly as strong.
So I will tell you, the best historic hedge against inflation, against uncertainty in the market, is in fact the only asset that has never really been worth zero.
I'm talking, of course, About gold.
You know, the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen openly admitted to having blown it when it came to inflation.
She did this just a couple of months ago.
We hit a 40-year high at 9.1% last month, thanks to the geniuses in the White House and around the White House and at the Federal Reserve.
She said, I was wrong about the path inflation would take.
Well, yeah, I know.
We all know that.
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One thing has become very clear in the United States, and really not just in the United States, around the world, there's now a revolt against the expert class, the people in the bureaucratic elite who have graduated from top universities and gone to top level law schools and gotten their PhDs in political science.
I'm not talking about a revolt against the people who spend their lives actually creating new products and services, you know, the scientists who create the web telescope or something, or the people who are creating brand new technologies in quantum computing.
That's not what the rebellion that you're seeing worldwide right now is against.
It's a rebellion against a cadre of folks who tend to believe that they have the capacity and ability, because they have high IQ, to control all the things in the world and make things better on every single front so long as you give them inordinate power to do so.
They also tend to believe that they speak for a higher level of morality.
And when you combine these two things, an expert class that claims expertise, but can't actually deliver, with a morality that runs directly against that of the vast majority of not only Americans, but people globally, what you end up with is a class that is held in disdain by nearly everyone.
And that class has been the governing class in the West for solidly 30 years at this point, really since the end of the Cold War.
During the Cold War, the expert class really was not predominant because there was an existential threat on the borders of the West.
And so everything was about fighting off that existential threat.
And so if experts made recommendations that seemed weird, if they made recommendations that seemed to undercut the ability of the West to fight off the Soviet Union, well then people just disregard that.
And this is why you got populist revolutions in, for example, the 1980s.
It's why you got Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of Britain.
It's why you got Ronald Reagan as President of the United States because of the failures of the expert class during the 1960s and the 1970s.
We have seen a consistent set of failures from the expert class, from essentially the fall of the Berlin Wall and on.
And then people wonder, why is it that people are so angry?
Why are they so angry?
Well, the answer is because they feel lied to.
They were told that there was a group of people who held a better value system, a system that was based on wisdom, a system that was based on an incisive capacity to see answers to difficult questions.
And these people were of one specific type.
The people who went to top universities and who did not believe in God, who are secularists.
They didn't believe in all of these old, weird ideas about how you ought to live your life in terms of family or in terms of sexual behavior.
They didn't believe in any of that stuff.
They were here to free you so that you would be personally liberated.
And then you would be able to just count on them to take care of all of your problems on the foreign policy, economic, environmental sphere.
And it turns out all of that was a lie.
And you are starting to see that break out into the open right now.
So one of the big questions the Democrats have been asking themselves in the United States, for example, right now is why are you seeing a major shift among minority voters toward the Republican Party?
There's a good piece by David French over at the Dispatch all about this over the weekend.
And it really is telling because what the elite class has done is not just blown it in terms of claiming expertise.
It's they've linked their own expertise with a certain way of seeing the world, with a worldview.
That worldview is secular in orientation.
It does not believe in religious values.
It doesn't believe that there are such a thing as traditional values passed down over the course of generations that ought to be upheld because they're just so smart.
They're rationalists who can rationalize their way into any bad idea.
On any front, but claim that they are morally superior to you.
So the same people who are claiming that they can run the world economy and they will run it beautifully are adding pronouns to their bios.
The same people who are suggesting that they can handle the illegal immigration problem in a sophisticated and nuanced way.
Those are the same people who are telling you that your child should be told at the age of five that he might be a she.
Those things are tied together, and that's a real problem.
So here's what David French writes.
He says, there's talk of realignment in the air.
If you think all the way back to 2012, you might remember a certain phrase, the coalition of the ascendant.
This was the Obama coalition, the collection of all of America's growing demographics from nonwhite voters to single women.
The Romney voters, by contrast, were fading.
White, Christian and married.
They were the demographic losers in a population that was becoming more diverse and more secular.
Democratic dominance was inevitable.
That analysis should have caused us to feel a certain looming dread.
Nations that use race or ethnicity as the organizing principle of politics are often quite unstable and quite violent.
This is true across the world, and it's true in our own land, too.
Systematic racial division and oppression fractured the country once.
It's foolish to think it couldn't fracture again, especially when the political class intentionally mobilizes voters to vote as a racial bloc.
Optimistic Democrats, says David French, didn't see Donald Trump's victory in 2016 so much as a refutation of the coalition of the ascendant theory, as a quirk, as much as a quirk of the electoral college, and a reminder that Hillary Clinton wasn't Barack Obama.
The nation wasn't quite majority-minority yet.
And thus, the white majority could still win races when identity politics reigns supreme.
But 2020 told a different tale.
The Democrats got whiter, Republicans got more diverse, and now all the assumptions are scrambled.
Donald Trump lost the popular vote by a wider margin than he did in 2016, but he did materially better with Hispanic, Asian, and Black voters.
In fact, Trump did better than Romney with non-white voters in 2016, and he improved on that showing in 2020.
What was once seen as an aberration now looks like a trend.
Moreover, there is good reason to believe that Hispanic voters will continue to migrate to the GOP.
We talked about this last week.
Roy Tisciera had an excellent piece over his Substack talking about the polling from Echelon Insights showing the gap between the white college-educated Democrats and Hispanic voters in particular.
There's one key element of that.
Most of the media will ignore because there's one thing you're not allowed to say in sophisticated circles and that is the word God.
You're not, you're never allowed to talk about that.
Now, I'm not right here making the argument for or against biblical values.
Obviously, I'm a believer in biblical values.
I wear a funny hat to show it every single day.
Okay, but that's not the argument I'm making.
The argument I'm making is that the vast majority of people across time and across cultures have believed in a higher power and they believe that their lives ought to be oriented toward trying to divine the purposes of that higher power and then doing the bidding of that higher power.
The idea of living a life of religion is not just common in the United States for most of world's history and indeed today.
It is still the most common way that people live across the world.
The Democratic Party has separated off from this idea en masse.
En masse.
So here's what David French points out.
He looks at a 2018 Pew Research Center survey.
on American religious beliefs.
And here is what it shows.
It shows that non-white Democrats more closely resemble Republicans than white Democrats with regard to their beliefs in God.
So, 72% of white Republicans believe in God as described by the Bible.
Another 22% believe in other higher power or spiritual force.
Right, so they still believe in God, but they don't actually believe in the Bible, or they sort of believe in the Bible, but they don't believe in it anyway, literally.
Okay, that leaves a grand total of 5% of white Republicans who don't believe in God.
5%.
Among non-white Republicans, the numbers are exactly the same.
Only 5% don't believe in God or in a higher power.
Now, if you look at non-white Democrats, non-white Democrats, only 5% of non-white Democrats say that they do not believe in God or a higher power.
However, 21% of white Democrats say they do not believe in God or a higher power.
That is a massive gap.
What that means is that non-white Democrats, when it comes to their beliefs in God, look a lot more like white Republicans and non-white Republicans than they do like white Democrats.
And what does that mean?
That's a proxy.
Okay, because belief in God, particularly the first part, belief in God as described in the Bible, right?
Put aside belief in another higher power, spiritual force, kind of generic spiritualism that tends to predominate at reformed synagogues and liberal churches.
Belief in God as described in the Bible.
Again, here are the numbers.
72% of white Republicans, yes on belief in God as described in the Bible.
60% of non-white Republicans, same thing.
61% of non-white Democrats also believe in God as described in the Bible.
Which means that they hold certain views, not just about God, but about the God of the Bible.
And the God of the Bible has a pretty traditional view of roles.
Of gender roles, of marital roles, of family roles, of how life ought to be constructed so as to achieve human happiness.
And the white Democrats, only 32%, 32, one half of the percentage of non-white Democrats, 32% of white Democrats only believe in God as described in the Bible.
32%, 3 in 10 versus 6 in 10 non-white Democrats.
And that has real ramifications, because these are not just sort of generic questions about how often you go to church or something.
What this has to do with is, people who believe in traditional religion, they have very similar views, regardless of their politics on economics.
They tend to have very similar views about things like, do men exist and do women exist?
They tend to have very similar views on, should a child have a mother and a father?
And similar views on, should grandparents have a role in a familial system helping deal with the children?
All of these basic structures of human life are far more common as an intensely believed mode of life among white Republicans, non-white Republicans, and non-white Democrats than among white Democrats, who are an entire class apart.
The non-white, the white Democrats, that group of people, if you say God in a company of white Democrats, that is not a polite word to say.
That is a word that alienates people and starts to get very uncomfortable very quickly.
And it's not just me saying this.
Adeem Beckett, the editor of the New York Times, in 2016, he said, you know, when I'm talking to the people who work with me and for me, they don't understand religion.
We're supposed to report on religion, but we literally don't understand because none of us live that way and none of us believe any of that.
I want to make sure that we are much more creative about beats out in the country.
So that we understand that anger and disconnectedness that people feel.
I think I use religion as an example because I was raised Catholic in New Orleans.
I think that the New York-based and Washington-based too, probably, media powerhouses don't quite get religion.
We have a fabulous religion writer, but she's all alone.
We don't get religion.
We don't get the role of religion in people's lives.
And I think we can do much, much better.
And I think there are things that we can be more creative about.
By the way, you can hear in the language that he uses there, there's one point where he stumbles is we don't agree.
And he stops himself because he knows that sounds really bad.
We don't agree with religion, but that's true.
And by the polling statistics, it's true.
The percentage of people who believe that God is powerful, knowing, and loving, right?
The sort of traditional description of God.
Powerful, knowing, and loving.
67% of white Republicans say all three.
66% of non-white Republicans, all three.
64% of non-white Democrats, all three.
Powerful, knowing, and loving.
35% of white Democrats agree that God is powerful, knowing, and loving.
Okay, so that gap has some really significant ramifications.
It means that people in these sort of secular enclaves in Los Angeles, and New York, and Washington, D.C., white, college-educated, upper-crust people, they don't believe in God.
They believe that religion is a net evil, that it creates polarization, that it creates violence, and all this sort of stuff.
And then they say to everybody else, we ought to run the system, because we're really smart.
We went to college, and we've created some sort of air-staffed social capital through the college and work relationships that we've formed.
And by the way, there is a secular church, but the secular church exists in universities.
This is why it has a cult-like atmosphere, where you have to call out people who have sinned.
It is more like a church than it is like a secular university of learning.
And this is the same in a lot of these corporate halls in left-wing centers.
You're supposed to acknowledge and repeat the words or phrases that are spoken to you on high by the secular cult leader.
When it's time for Black Lives Matter, you got to put that black square up.
And if you do not, you're in serious trouble.
If it's Pride Month, you best put the pride, not even the old gay pride flag, the pride progress flag up as an emoji or you are no longer part of the secular religion.
Well, this view of the world is entirely at odds with the vast majority of people all over the globe, as well as the vast majority of people here in the United States right now.
And so Democrats can't see this.
They think because they're very smart, we're really educated, and we can handle all of this.
Now, if the deal was, if the sort of tacit deal here was that you could be patronized by these people because they were so good at their jobs, right?
They could patronize your values.
They could say that you were a bitter clinger clinging to God and guns and religion and xenophobia and all of this, which is exactly what Barack Obama said in 2008.
But the subtle deal was, Work here to solve your problems, right?
So yeah, we attack your values.
Yeah, we think your values are crap.
Yeah, we think you're a bunch of benighted backwater flyover country idiots.
Yeah, we think all those things, but that's because we fix things.
So the trade-off is you're gonna have to just deal with the fact that we don't like your values because our values, our secular values, have led us to be so much wiser than you.
They've led us to create new priorities.
Priorities that we care about.
Like, we understand you don't care about those priorities so much, but we will make your life better in spite of you.
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So on an international level, this actually does create an enormous amount of backlash.
On an international level, there are a lot of countries all over the world.
I'm talking about Asia, Africa, the Middle East, parts of Eastern Europe, where people look at the secular left of the West and they say, you guys don't get to tell us that our values are bad.
Because I'm looking at your values and you guys have extraordinarily high suicidal ideation rates.
And half your kids are now identifying as LGBTQ plus minus divided by ampersand.
So no, we don't buy into that.
But at least you could make the case if they were good at everything else.
If they were great at everything else.
If the elites, sure they have this crazy value system, but the proof is in the pudding.
The value system must be good because they're really good at their jobs, right?
Because that cult of expertise, the idea that they are scientifically minded bureaucrats and that science has invaded every aspect of your life.
When you talk to people on the secular left, this is what they will say.
They'll say, I just follow the science.
Everything is science.
Everything gets promoted under the rubric of science.
And here I'm not talking, again, about people who actually do science.
I'm talking about people who are in political science, which is not a field, okay?
I majored in poli-sci when I was in college.
There's no such thing as political science.
There's just politics.
There's no such thing as social science.
There is just studies, okay?
The idea that this is any way, shape, or form similar to, like, performing an experiment in a laboratory is just nonsense.
It's not true.
But you have a bunch of elite people who have decided to hijack the rubric of science.
Science is their new god.
It's at least what they're going to act in the name of.
And then they're going to fix all your problems.
So, how's it going?
Right?
That would be the big question.
How's it going?
So the experts, the bureaucratic experts that are going to take the power away from you, they're going to tell you your culture sucked.
They're going to tell you they could restructure the family.
They're going to tell you they can indoctrinate your kids into all modes of bizarre gender ideology.
They can indoctrinate your kids into the idea that America is really not a particularly special place and that America is racist and all this.
They can do this because they're the experts.
So, If that paid off, at the very least, they'd have to be good at their job.
And herein lies the rub.
They're really bad at their job.
And this is what you're seeing right now.
When Joe Biden took office, he came into office pledging that he was going to restore expertise.
This was an open campaign pledged by the Democrats.
The professionals are back in charge.
And then they proceeded to blow it in every way it is possible to blow it.
They got the experts are back in charge, and it turns out they suck at their jobs.
And so we are about to get a massive rebellion on both the right and the left, by the way.
As we'll discuss in a moment, against this elite class that said, without any shred of humility, that they could reshape moral society, they could reshape your relationship with your own family, they could reshape the values you live by, and they could reshape the economy, foreign policy, the environment, all these things, because they're just so damn smart.
Except, maybe, they're not as smart as they think they are, because no one's as smart as they think they are.
It's not that they're stupid.
It's that they are under the grave misimpression that the diffuse knowledge of all humanity is somehow less than the knowledge that they have personally.
Which, by the way, is always false.
That is almost in virtually every area, unless you're talking about like an extraordinarily specific area that requires intensive study, like you're a nuclear physicist or something.
Diffuse knowledge of how the world works is way larger than the knowledge any one person holds, right?
There's a basic F.A.
Hayekian principle when it comes to why, for example, free market economics work and centralized economics do not.
Because no group at the top of an economy deciding what prices should be and how goods and services should be allocated is going to have as much information as the entire society at large.
That's true in nearly everything.
But these very smart people, because they're very smart, they think, well, I have more IQ points than that guy, and that guy, and that guy.
That's true.
But when you aggregate all the knowledge of those people, it's way more than whatever you think you know.
It's way more wisdom than whatever you think you have.
So how is this manifested?
It's manifested in tremendous failure.
So on the economic front, we have 40-year highs in inflation.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Federal Reserve officials have signaled they are likely to raise interest rates by 0.75 percentage points later this month for the second straight meeting as part of an aggressive effort to combat high inflation.
Policymakers left the door open to a larger full percentage point increase at the July 26-27 gathering.
Some of them simultaneously poured cold water on the IDA in recent interviews and public comments ahead of their pre-meeting quiet period, which began on Saturday.
Some officials pointed to signs economic activity was softening as they raised rates at a historically brisk pace.
You don't want to overdo the rate increases.
A 75 basis point hike, folks, is huge, said Fed Governor Christopher Waller.
Don't say because you're not going 100, you're not doing your job.
Well, except you're not doing your job.
Because you were telling us until five seconds ago, you experts, you genius experts, you were telling us, we wouldn't have to worry about inflation because you were in charge.
Don't worry, the inflation was transitory, it would all go away.
And now, as Mohamed El-Erian of Allianz has said, you're tap, tap, tapping the brakes and it's too late.
That cliff is right here, which means you're going to have to slam the brakes on.
There's gonna be pain.
And that pain is going to be incurred because the experts blew it.
And then they ask us to trust us.
To avoid the cliff.
Well, why would I trust you?
You're the ones who put us on the path to the cliff in the first place.
We didn't have to go this way.
One of the most basic...
Notions of Econ 101 is too much money following too few goods leads to inflation.
So what did the Federal Reserve do?
They tossed $7 trillion at the problem in 2020.
And then they tossed trillions more of dollars at the problem in 2021.
And then Joe Biden poured trillions more in spending on top of that.
And they're like, oh my God, I can't believe inflation is happening.
Maybe you experts are not so expert at what it is that you do.
And on the economy, it shows.
The Labor Department reported the Consumer Price Index rose 9.1% in June from a year before.
That is a new four-decade high.
It showed inflation pressures broadening across the economy.
Fed officials have raised interest rates at their past three meetings, beginning with a quarter-point increase in March.
But I'm sorry, us being at Two percent in interest rates right now, that is not going to quash inflation.
Meanwhile, you are likely to see the stock market take another hit because as the economy slows, the earnings go down.
When the earnings go down, that is going to combine with the fact that stocks have been way overpriced thanks to the inflationary bubble that's been created to be another knock on stock.
So what's happening right now is a market correction because so much money was available to people.
They're like, what do I do with this?
And they just threw it at the stock market.
They threw it at tech bubble stocks like Twitter.
Which was, last I checked, at a 160 price-to-earnings ratio, which is insane.
160.
Normally, on the stock market, it's like 20 to 25.
160.
That's how much money people had, and they were just throwing it at things, right?
Throwing it at bored gorilla NFTs and such.
And that sort of stuff is likely to happen when there's a lot of money floating around the system.
Okay, well, so let's take Twitter as an example.
What happens when the original price-to-earnings ratio was way out of whack, like 160-200?
You get a market correction when the money goes away, right?
People sell their stock because they need the access to the cash.
Okay, what happens then when the economy slows and the earnings go down?
Well, then you get another market correction.
So I think we're about to see wave two of market correction in the stock market.
According to the Wall Street Journal, investors hoping a strong start to earnings season would jolt the stock market from its slump haven't gotten much satisfaction.
Early reports from U.S.
companies have refocused attention on some of the biggest challenges facing businesses, from the threat of an economic slowdown to the pressure that rising costs are putting on corporate profits.
The lackluster corporate results, together with a fresh inflation reading at yet another four-decade high, pulled major indices lower as investors braced for the Federal Reserve to aggressively lift interest rates again.
Even after staging a big Friday rally, the S&P 500 declined 0.9% last week, bringing its losses this year to 19%, which is a solid loss in the stock market.
It's been an inauspicious start to earnings season so far, said Matt Perrin, Director of Research at Janus Henderson Investors.
You're starting to see some pressure on the expense line due to inflation.
Of the 7% of S&P 500 companies that have reported so far, 60% have beaten earnings expectations.
That is below the average of 77% over the last five years, according to FactSet.
So again, the experts blew it on the economy.
They did.
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that inflation has outpaced wage growth.
I mean, dramatically.
And now it's cutting into spending as well.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S.
wage growth accelerated as weekly earnings jumped more than 7% in April and May of 2020.
The gain got a boost from low inflation and fewer expenses, bolstering the finances of Americans who kept their jobs.
Over the past year, wage increases have continued to exceed pre-pandemic levels, but those steady gains have been wiped out entirely by high prices.
When you take inflation into account, there hasn't been a single month with a year-over-year earnings growth since March 2021.
Which, not coincidentally, is when Joe Biden was ramming through that $1.9 trillion boondoggle stimulus package that was completely unnecessary.
Workers, according to the Washington Post, are now picking up extra jobs just to pay for gas and food.
This is all the product of the experts.
The experts who said that they would have all of this under control, they did not have all of this under control.
And the same thing holds true, not just with regard to domestic policy, it holds true with regard to foreign policy.
They keep talking about gas prices, for example, and they pretend they know what they're doing.
They don't know what they're doing.
So Jared Bernstein, the White House economic advisor, he was asked about whether the price of gas is going to rise given the fact that we're about to put new sanctions, Europe and the United States, on Russian oil and natural gas exports.
And he was like, I don't know, maybe.
Well, that's reassuring.
The Washington Post is reporting that the Treasury Department says that the oil price could soar 50% after, actually more than 50% after the European sanctions on Russia kick in on Russian gas.
So the question is, are analysts who are predicting that that might make gas prices $6 a gallon accurate?
Could prices actually go back up?
So, a lot to unpack there.
First of all, you talked about the price of oil.
I should have mentioned this earlier.
While the gas price is down about 8 or 9 percent, the oil price is down about 20 percent.
So when we talk about the president doing all he can to provide relief at the pump, one of the things that he's doing is trying to nudge these companies to pass some of those savings along to consumers.
Okay, so again, they're just gonna yell at the gas stations.
Okay, so here's how the experts decide to do their foreign policy.
So the liberal-minded experts, when it comes to foreign policy, they tend to fall into the trap of thinking that moral absolutism is a substitute for real policy.
So, morality obviously plays a role in foreign policy, clearly.
The United States is a moral country on the world stage.
We try to be.
We are the most moral country in world history on the world stage, which is why we've ended tyranny in a bevy of countries around the world, and we've freed hundreds of millions of people and raised billions of people from abject poverty.
All of that can be true.
It also happens to be true that there is no substitute for a good, old-fashioned understanding of how realpolitik works.
When George Washington talked about avoiding foreign entanglements, what he meant by that was that we always have to do what's in the best interest of America.
Because if you believe that America is the greatest, best hope for humanity, then America weakening itself through foreign entanglements that it has no intention on actually fulfilling actually makes it worse off.
But the expert class has said that you don't need to worry about any of that sort of stuff.
The expert class says, for example, that we must be invested in Iran moderating for no apparent reason.
We must be invested in the notion that the Palestinian issue in the Middle East is central to all economics and all deal making in the Middle East.
And none of that is true.
This is what the expert class told us for years.
And so when Joe Biden was running for president, he and his experts, they suggested repeatedly that they were going to crack down on Saudi Arabia, right?
This was the moral thing to do, to crack down on Saudi Arabia.
Now listen, Saudi Arabia is a tyranny.
So is pretty much every other country in that region.
The question is whether that tyranny is good for the United States or bad for the United States, whether we get net benefit or net detriment from that tyranny.
Doesn't mean that in the high in the sky, best of all possible worlds, a thousand flowers would bloom and democracy would bust out everywhere and suddenly there would be an insane amount of free speech and freedom of expression.
Like that would be the best.
True.
It would also be unbelievable if all of our rivers flowed with milk chocolate.
That would be an amazing thing.
It would.
It would be incredible.
There's reality and then there's what you wish would happen.
And our liberal elite class, particularly on foreign policy, have a really bad habit of hoping that because they think they're in the moral right, that means that good things will follow.
That is not expert.
That is just actually kind of dumb.
So, for example, in October of 2020, Vice President Joe Biden, he was then running for president, obviously.
He made a statement on the anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi's murder.
Okay, so Jamal Khashoggi was killed, you will remember, in 2018.
Okay, so the calendar now says it is 2022.
In those intervening years, how many people have been killed by the Iranians in Syria?
How many people have been killed by the Houthis in Yemen?
In that intervening period, how many dissidents have been jailed by the Turkish government or the Jordanian government?
How many terror attacks have been sponsored in Afghanistan by parties outside Afghanistan?
But Jamal Khashoggi is top of news still in 2022.
And that's because in 2020, there was a decision that was made by the Left wing of the liberal establishment, the elites, the foreign policy geniuses who had brought about the Iran nuclear deal, which was a disaster.
Their deal was that they were going to go hard after Saudi Arabia.
They were angry at Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia was a particular problem now.
Now, nothing Saudi Arabia does now is particularly different than anything Saudi Arabia has been doing for several decades at this point.
The only thing that changed is that the foreign policy elite decided they were going to make common cause of the wrong, which by the way, is what pushed Saudi Arabia and the UAE and a bunch of other Gulf states into peace dealing with the Israelis.
So in October of 2020, Joe Biden went out there, expert that he is, that the professionals were back in charge, and he made a principled statement about the death of Jamal Khashoggi.
Jamal Khashoggi had been a writer on and off for the Washington Post.
He's also associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, shouldn't have been murdered, also was not a real advocate of Western democratic values, I would say.
In any case, Joe Biden put out this statement.
He said, two years ago, Saudi operatives reportedly acting at the direction of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman murdered and dismembered Saudi dissident journalist and U.S.
resident Jamal Khashoggi.
His offense, for which he paid with his life, was criticizing the policies of his government.
Today, I join many brave Saudi women and men, activists, journalists, and the international community in mourning Khashoggi's death and echoing his call for people everywhere to exercise their universal rights and freedom.
Jamal Khashoggi and his loved ones deserve accountability under a Biden-Harris administration.
We will reassess our relationship with the kingdom.
We'll make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.
So remember, this is Joe Biden's highfalutin.
expert statement about foreign policy. If you flashback only about two years. And then you'll remember that in 2021, Jen Psaki, who is then the White House press secretary, she said that Joe Biden was basically going to try to cut Mohammed bin Salman out of the conversation entirely. So Mohammed bin Salman is effectively the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia at this point, because the king of Saudi Arabia is very elderly and not in good health.
And Jen Psaki was like, well, what if we just, we'll just pretend MBS doesn't exist, right?
This is the elites.
They're geniuses.
They don't care about your oil price.
They don't care about how actual foreign policy works.
What they care about is their own sense of self-worth.
So here is Jen Psaki explaining the Biden administration position here.
We're going to recalibrate our relationship with Saudi Arabia.
And that President Biden, one of the questions there was also, just to go back to the context of it, whether he would be speaking with MBS.
And part of that is going back to engagement counterpart to counterpart.
The President's counterpart is King Salman, and I expect at an appropriate time he would have a conversation with him.
I don't have a prediction of the timeline on that.
But I'll also say that we have – Saudi Arabia is in a position where they are defending themselves from threats from the region.
They are – they have critical self-defense needs, and we will continue to work with them on those even as we make clear areas where we have disagreements and where we have concerns.
Okay, the reason this became super awkward is because Joe Biden went to Saudi Arabia over the weekend.
And while he was in Saudi Arabia, there'd been a big deal.
Was he going to shake the hand of Mohammed bin Salman?
This is a self-made problem.
What Joe Biden should have said is, I shake the hands of a lot of heads of states of foreign countries who I think have done really terrible things.
That's what being an international leader is.
You're routinely in conversation with people you think do terrible things on a regular basis.
So, in order for the United States to achieve its objectives, what am I supposed to do?
Smack Mohammed bin Salman upside the face?
Like backhand him or something?
So instead, Joe Biden had this whole stupid charade that he played with the State Department.
Was he going to shake his hand?
Was he not going to shake his hand?
Was he going to pretend that it was COVID that was preventing him from shaking hands?
Well, instead, Biden got out of his car and he immediately fist-bumped with MBS.
Which, by the way, looks a lot more chummy than a handshake.
The great irony is, in trying to avoid the handshake, he looked much more chummy.
You fist-bump with your friends.
You don't fist-bump with strangers.
At least not really except for COVID reasons.
Here is Joe Biden looking pretty chummy with MBS.
So he gets out of the car.
Very slowly, because that is the only speed at which he moves.
Man, he constantly looks like he's about to fall.
And then he gets out and he fist bumps Mohammed bin Salman and they walk in together.
And this launches the left into spasms of apoplexy.
They're just so upset.
We've been failed.
We were told that you were going to stand up to the Saudis.
And so you have, for example, Dana Bash asking Jared Bernstein, why is Joe Biden fist bumping a murderer?
I want you to look at this image.
I know you've seen it.
The world has seen it.
The fist bump.
And the reaction has been swift because this is a man who ordered the brutal murder of a journalist and then his body was dismembered with a bone saw.
Jamal Khashoggi's fiance said if he were alive today he would say, is this the accountability you promised for my murder?
The blood of MBS's next victims is on your hands.
Why is he fist bumping a murderer?
Okay, so I mean, this is how the media responds.
Now, the real answer to this is that when Joe Biden was campaigning, and then when he was president, he should have said, I'm doing what's in the best interest of the United States.
We do need lower gas prices in the United States, which, by the way, is the other reason he shouldn't have embraced garbage environmental policy that cut down on the ability of the United States to be more oil independent of countries like Saudi Arabia.
So Joe Biden has responded to this, as the experts typically do, by getting randomly angry at people and shouting at the clouds.
So he was asked by a member of the media, The Saudi Foreign Minister says he didn't hear you accuse the Crown Prince of Khashoggi's murder.
Is he telling the truth?
No.
He was like a fist pump, Mr. President.
Why do you guys talk about something maddening?
No, he is like a fish pump, Mr. President.
Why don't you guys talk about something that matters?
I haven't reacted to questions that matter.
Why don't you guys talk about something that matters?
Well, I mean, you're the one who started this, sir.
You and your expert class started this conversation.
And then you're unwilling to finish the conversation.
Joe Biden, by the way, claimed that he had confronted MBS about the Khashoggi murder, and the Saudi foreign minister was like, no, you didn't.
That's not a thing that happened.
Joe Biden is an angry, elderly gentleman.
But if you wish to alleviate someone else's anger, let's say that you've made a boo-boo and you need to fix this.
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This week, we are celebrating the one-year anniversary of our podcast, Morning Wire.
It is essentially the conservative response to The Daily, which is an extraordinarily biased New York Times podcast that covers the news in 15 minutes or less.
That's what we do here at Morning Wire.
It's just great.
It gives you the news you need to know in 15 minutes or less.
Check out Morning Wire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Daily Wire Plus, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Also this week, Crane & Company, our sports show over here at Daily Wire.
They are over at the College Football Hall of Fame interviewing some of the top coaches and players from the SEC.
Be sure to tune in to their daily sports show wherever you listen to podcasts.
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It's the answer to ESPN's woke-ification of sports.
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You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So Americans are really frustrated with the expert class, obviously.
These people don't hold your values.
They fail you on economics.
They fail you on foreign policy.
They fail you on health as well.
So we just came through a pandemic in which some parts of the expert class, namely the people who make vaccines, did a pretty good job.
And then everybody else did an unbelievably crappy job, rolling out the vaccines, explaining what the vaccines were all about, trying to explain public policy.
They did a terrible job.
Well, they're doing it again.
I mean, it's amazing.
So right now there's this worldwide health quasi-crisis With regard to monkeypox, I call it a quasi-crisis because again, I do not think that a sexually transmitted disease ought to be treated with the same levels of sort of crisis as a disease that you get that's airborne.
Mainly because the vectors are just significantly less transmissible.
In one you literally have to just be in the room with somebody, in another you have to be engaged in some sort of sexual activity, and in this case actually a particular type of sexual activity, in order for monkeypox to be a likely outcome.
However, With some thousands of cases that have now been identified in the United States, the question arises, why has this become an issue now?
And the answer is because the experts blew it.
According to NBC News, a series of crucial mistakes in the rollout of the monkeypox vaccine have significantly inhibited America's ability to distribute doses and prevent the troubling and in some cases extremely painful disease from becoming endemic.
In the meantime, the virus has deepened its hold on the country with confirmed cases rising tenfold in the last month.
So a total of more than a thousand as of Thursday, that's almost certainly an undercount.
Vaccine seekers have become fearful and frustrated as they watch friends and loved ones get sick or they themselves develop uncomfortable lesions.
In a pattern familiar from the COVID pandemic, the mishaps started with limited testing capacity.
The U.S.
did not order more monkeypox vaccine doses to add to its stockpile until June, even though the virus started spreading in May.
In addition, regulators did not finish inspecting a key Denmark facility manufacturing monkeypox vaccine until Saturday, leaving 1.1 million ready-to-distribute doses still waiting to be shipped to the United States.
So, well done again on the expertise there, guys.
I mean, the FDA, its literal job is to make sure that products that are helpful to your health get to market.
And they aren't even screening the products until too late.
And they aren't actively investigating the drugs that could be shipped in until too late.
Which is why, presumably, the WHO is on the verge of declaring monkeypox a global health emergency again, after asking experts to meet as cases continued to soar.
The World Health Organization are now aware of 9,200 cases in 63 countries in the last update issued on Tuesday.
This WHO meeting will be the second for the emergency committee, according to the Daily Mail, with experts set to decide on if monkeypox cases constitute a public health emergency which should be of international concern.
So it's actually hard to find areas where the expert class has not failed in dramatic fashion.
So what do you end up with when the expert class fails this much?
Because they overpromise, right?
In order to promulgate radical ideology and radical worldviews, they have to overpromise.
They have to say they can do everything.
Give us the power, we will fix all your problems.
But when you don't fix the problems, you end up with an extraordinarily bifurcated form of populism.
So, on the left, you end up with Bernie Sanders-style populism.
The argument there is that this elite class, it's just, it's ineffective.
They don't have the willpower.
It's not about the reality, which is that no one has the ability to do what this elite class has promised it could do, namely iron out all the rough patches of life, prevent you from ever having an economic downturn, prevent there from ever being a necessity to work hand in glove with regimes that are bad.
You never have to do any of those bad, these were all the promises that they made.
And also the promise of radical individual autonomy that was rooted in sexual self-identification.
Overthrowing all fundamental institutions of Western society.
That was the promise they made.
And all those promises have gone unfulfilled, except ironically, for the promise about overthrowing those fundamental institutions, and that's resulted in massive depression, suicidal ideation, and breakdown of the social order.
So, they've blown it on all of these fronts.
So what the left says, the hard left, the Bernie Sanders left, they say, well, You know, dang it, if only they were just more committed.
It's really just a problem of commitment.
If we worship at the altar of the people who are the most audacious, if we get more people with more willpower, well, that will fix the problem.
You hear this sort of rhetoric all the time on the political left.
Well, the real problem with Joe Biden, the real problem with Joe Manchin, is they don't have the sufficient will.
And honestly, that's Joe Biden's fault.
Because when Joe Biden came into office, he could have said this, listen, guys, I have 50 senators, but really my 50 senator majority is extraordinarily slim, which means I'm not going to be able to get all these world breaking changes you want on.
I'm going to be able to do a minor infrastructure bill, maybe a decent size.
I'll be able to do like a small change to Obamacare.
I'll be able to move forward on these few proposals, maybe.
And that's it.
And everybody else who's telling you they can do more, they're lying to you.
But Joe Biden wasn't willing to say that because he, like all politicians, wants to promise the world.
And the natural outcome of that is that everybody gets really depressed, including, by the way, Jill Biden.
So Jill Biden apparently was speaking the other day and she started lamenting the fact that her husband has basically been useless.
So she was, according to the UK Daily Mail, Jill Biden, the greatest doctor in all the land, spoke at a fundraiser for the DNC on Saturday.
She said her husband had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do.
But, she added, the president wasn't able to prioritize his plans.
She said, the president has so many hopes and plans for the things he wanted to do.
Every time he turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment.
He just had so many things thrown his way.
Oh, it was the distractions, guys.
It wasn't that the expert class can't do these things because they're not possible.
It's that he was distracted from doing these things.
Right, so the expert class itself, what they say is, well, there are just too many obstacles, you know, otherwise we could have done it.
I mean, we certainly could have fixed all, we could have, we could have ended cancer, right?
This is the sort of language that Joe Biden uses about cancer.
A cancer moonshot emanimating.
And if only we had the will, we can end cancer!
It's like, no, you can't.
You can't, I'm sorry, you can't.
You've provided no evidence of the idea you can end cancer.
But again, it's all, well, if only my enemies didn't exist, I could, that's the, that's the perspective of the left.
And the people who are anti-Biden say, well, it's because he's not sufficiently committed.
This is the tack that Bernie Sanders likes to take nearly all the time on every issue.
So Bernie Sanders right now is very, very upset at Joe Manchin.
He's upset at Joe Manchin because Joe Manchin basically said, I am not going to vote in favor of a quote-unquote compromise climate bill that was going to subject the coal industry in West Virginia to basically being destroyed.
So Bernie Sanders' answer here is that Joe Manchin is going to destroy the planet.
If you could just demonstrate sufficient will, we could fix all of our problems.
This is the left populist response to elite failure.
You have people like Manchin, Sinema to a lesser degree, who are intentionally sabotaging the president's agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want.
Nothing new about this.
And the problem was that we continue to talk to Manchin like he was serious.
He was not.
This is a guy who is a major recipient of fossil fuel money, a guy who has received campaign contributions from 25 Republican billionaires.
That's insufficient will, right?
That's the argument Bernie Sanders likes to make.
You had Representative Pramila Jayapal, again, one of the progressives in Congress of Washington.
She called Manchin's decision, quote, nothing short of catastrophic.
There were condemnations from environmentalists that he was going to doom human life on Earth.
Joe Manchin was going to doom human life on Earth, which is an unbelievable statement.
It really is pretty wild.
There's a piece in the New York Times today by Dr. Leia Stokes, associate professor of political science, not so much science happening, over at UC Santa Barbara, talking about how evil Joe Manchin is.
Say, Mr. Manchin's refusal to agree to climate investments will hurt the economy he claims he wants to protect.
Over the past year, Manchin has taken more money from the oil and gas industry than any other member of Congress, including every Republican.
According to federal filings, one thing I've never understood about Manchin is how he looks his grandchildren in the eye.
While he may leave his descendants plenty of money, they will also inherit a broken planet, right?
So the left's response to elite failure to do what they said they were going to do is they say, we just need renewed commitment.
More commitment will do it, which is why you see the popularity of AOC with the media chatter in class.
Entire article over the weekend about the imbecilic Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez in the Associated Press, all about how wonderful she is.
Quote, Ocasio-Cortez navigates the expectations that come with fame.
Wow, that's incredible.
AOC was almost hidden from the street as she stood behind a nondescript building in Queens that a local nonprofit is buying with federal money.
People spotted her anyway, slowly trickling up the sidewalk and forming a small line to get a picture with her.
The New York Congresswoman wrapped up her visit, did a quick interview with a Bengali-language TV crew, and posed for pictures with the people who were hovering nearby.
For Ocasio-Cortez, her visits through her district carry added significance because she is such a, she's a weathervane, you see.
She's sufficiently committed.
That's why she, Bernie Sanders, sufficiently committed.
That's really the important thing.
That's why you see Gavin Newsom out there being like, if I yell more about abortion, that will show my Democratic Party base that I really am committed.
You see the same thing from JB Pritzker.
Okay, so the revolt from the left against the elites is, what if we just say we're way more committed?
We'll say exactly the same stuff that people don't like, And we'll propose the same policies, we'll just be really committed to them.
The proposition from the right is, what if we don't trust the expert class at all?
Like, at all, at all, under any circumstances?
Now, the problem with that, of course, is that on occasion, the expert class isn't wrong.
Like, sometimes they're right.
I would say that, you know, the expert class is right, hmm, 30, 40% of the time, maybe, maybe 20%.
It's like they're always wrong.
But the temptation on the right is to say there's no such thing as actual knowledge.
Anything they say has to be thrown out.
And thus we'd be better off without any of this stuff entirely.
There's a lot of truth to it, but not total truth.
However, one thing is certainly true.
In this particular debate, the right has a massive advantage.
And the reason, in the end, that the right has a massive advantage in this particular debate is because the right is arguing that the elites are ineffective.
The right is arguing you should not give power to them because they will blow it.
And the left is arguing we are really effective and then they have nothing to back it up.
Nothing.
And they add on top of that the scorn that they have for the values that many people define their lives by.
And it's no wonder.
That it seems like the country is coming apart.
Because the people who have been in charge of every bureaucratic institution in the United States, all the transnational organizations, the people who meet and discuss policy at the top levels to figure out how to fix the world, the Davos, those people have done a terrible job.
And not only have they done a terrible job, they sneer at you while they do a terrible job.
That's why you get anger.
That's why you get populist revolutions right and left.
And that's why if the elite class wants to actually regain any credibility, you have to actually show some confidence.
A little bit of epistemological humility and a lot of confidence.
Show that you don't think you can fix all of our problems.
And then the problems you say you can fix, actually fix them.
And that requires you to do a lot more listening, it requires you to be a lot less audacious about how you approach these problems, a lot less ambitious, a lot more realistic, and a lot more respectful of the fact that a lot of people who are not you may not have your peculiarly Cloistered worldview about the world.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with additional content.
In the meantime, go check out one of our newest podcasts, Morning Wire.
Today's episode is available right now on Apple, Spotify, or Reveal Listen Podcast.
Make sure to tune in.
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