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July 27, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:17
Will The DOJ Criminally Charge Donald Trump? | Ep. 1543
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Time Text
Merrick Garland reportedly looks at criminally charging Donald Trump.
Kamala Harris announces her pronouns.
And the IMF predicts global recession as the Chinese signal more aggression on Taiwan.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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I didn't fully understand.
Yeah, we get it.
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Well, the Democrats basically have no choice at this point.
Merrick Garland has to do the bidding of his political masters, and that means that the DOJ is now looking seriously into charging Donald Trump, apparently, according to the Washington Post.
Carol Lennig, Devlin Barrett, Josh Dowsey, Spencer Hsu, like the entire staff of the Washington Post reporting, quote, the Justice Department is investigating President Donald Trump's actions as part of its criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to four people familiar with the matter.
Prosecutors who are questioning witnesses before a grand jury, including two top aides, two VP Mike Pence, have asked in recent days about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won.
According to two people familiar with the matter, both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
The prosecutors have asked hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump led in December 2020 and January 2021.
His pressure campaign on Pence to overturn the election and what instructions Trump gave his lawyers and advisors about fake electors and sending electors back to the states, according to these anonymous sources.
Some of the questions focus directly on the extent of Trump's involvement in the fake elector effort, led by his outside lawyers, including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani.
In addition, DOJ investigators in April received phone records of key officials and aides in the Trump administration, including his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to a couple of people familiar with the matter.
This entire story, of course, is anonymously sourced, which is what you would expect from the Merrick Garland DOJ.
The January 6th Committee has been extraordinarily leaky, and they've been leaky in one particular direction.
Obviously, it is not a shock to see Merrick Garland sending out these sorts of signals, given the amount of pressure that the DOJ is now under.
See, I've said for a while here that the serious threat of the January 6th Committee really is not directed at Donald Trump, because most people think of Trump what they already think of Trump.
The real threat here is for the Biden administration, because the entire predicate For the January 6th Committee is that criminal action occurred here.
And as I've asked from the beginning, if criminal action occurred, the January 6th Committee has no criminal investigative power.
They have no power to indict.
So what exactly are we doing here?
Normally, when you have an investigative committee, it is designed for oversight, meaning like how is our money being spent, or it's meant to establish new regulatory or legislative standards.
Neither one of those seems to be upheld.
And yet the January 6th committee was directed largely at the idea that a criminal prosecution was imminent.
So I kept saying, okay, so where's the DOJ?
And over time, that became the drumbeat.
It wasn't just from people like me, it was people on the left.
People on the left were saying, if all this is so criminal, where is Merrick Garland?
Where is Joe Biden?
Where is the evidence of his fealty to the cause in throwing over established law and going after Donald Trump?
Where can we grab a hook to hang our hat on when it comes to Donald Trump is a criminal?
After all, you're in charge of all of the criminal investigative offices of the federal government.
At this point.
And so it's not a shock to see Merrick Garland and the DOJ leaking this stuff out.
Now remember, five seconds ago they were talking about how they have to keep all of their investigation secret.
This is literally the line they were using yesterday in the mainstream press.
And one day later we have leaks, presumably from inside the DOJ, on their investigative intent with regard to Donald Trump.
The Washington Post and other news organizations, according to the Post, have previously written that the DOJ is examining the conduct of John Eastman, Giuliani, and others in Trump's orbit.
But the degree of prosecutors' interest in Trump's actions has not been previously reported, nor has the review of senior Trump aides' phone records.
A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A Justice Department spokesperson and lawyer for Meadows both declined to comment.
And as the Washington Post acknowledges, federal criminal investigations are by design opaque, and probes involving political figures are among the most closely held secrets over at the Justice Department, many end without criminal charges.
Apparently, according to another anonymous source familiar with the probe, investigators want to understand at a minimum what Trump told his lawyers and senior officials to do.
So again, the argument that they are making, as we'll get to in just a second, that Trump was attempting to initiate a coup is a very difficult one.
Amendment protected political activity or when or whether a person's speech could become part of an alleged conspiracy in support of a coup. So again the argument that they are making, as we'll get to in just a second, that Trump was attempting to initiate a coup is a very difficult one because let's say that again I think this is the most plausible scenario.
Trump convinced himself that he had won because Trump has never believed that he has ever lost on any subject, ever.
And so, he has a unique capacity to convince himself of nearly anything, including the idea that he won.
Let's say that that's just what he does.
And this is an intent crime, for the most part.
So, how do you distinguish First Amendment protected speech, like, I won the election, from, I won the election, subvert it.
How do you distinguish those two things, except by getting in the head of Donald Trump?
Which has always been questionable.
So, as I've said before, intent crime is very difficult to charge with regard to President Trump.
Now, the January 6th committee, they keep ratcheting up the pressure, and whether it's intentional or unintentional, all that pressure is falling on Merrick Garland.
So, Jamie Raskin, the congressman from Maryland, who ironically voted against the certification of the 2016 election before determining that voting against certifications of elections without basis was a form of insurrection.
Now, he says that con man Trump has met his match with the committee.
Okay, well, again, not with the committee, More with the DOJ if the DOJ decides to go forward on this thing.
And that's if the DOJ can actually substantiate a prosecution.
Here's Jamie Raskin.
Why do you think it is so hard to hold this one obviously guilty man accountable, given that you are also an impeachment leader of the second impeachment?
Did the founders shank it in how they set up the checks and balances?
Or are the other branches shanking it right now out of fear?
No, I think he's good at what he does.
I mean, he's from this city.
He's from New York.
And he's been a con man and an operator for a long time.
And he operates like the best of the crime bosses, which is he always insulates himself with several layers of lawyers and money and flunkies between himself and that which he orders to be done.
By the way, I do love that Stephen Colbert has basically just become a late night news host on CNN.
That was Stephen Colbert doing that interview.
There's so much comedying happening.
I mean, he is just one of our great comedians right there.
And I also enjoy the soft implication by Jamie Raskin that everyone in New York is a con man and a liar.
Well, he is from New York.
You know, like every con man is from New York.
OK, I mean, fact check.
Kind of true.
Anyway, he said it.
I didn't say it.
In any case, the pressure that is being put on Merrick Garland is extraordinary, which is why you're seeing these leaks right now.
Now, the question really is whether they can charge Donald Trump.
So Steve Riley over at The Grid has a good rundown on the possibility of which charges could theoretically be brought against Trump.
And you can see the weakness of the charges here.
Which is why, as we'll discuss in a moment, this really is sort of a last-ditch political play by Democrats to distract from the 2020 elections and maybe get rid of Trump ahead of 2024.
So what exactly are the charges that they're considering?
Well, theoretically, inciting insurrection.
Now, in order to do that, you actually have to demonstrate incitement.
Incitement is a very, very difficult crime to prove because incitement means that you actually have to tell people to go commit the crime.
And I'm sorry, march to the Capitol building and protest peacefully is not incitement.
You'd have to demonstrate that he actually was coordinating with people in advance, that his words were designed to incite imminent lawless action.
That's very difficult to prove.
And that's not proved by his actions after the violence begins.
That's no longer incitement.
That's a form of negligence, but it may not be criminal negligence.
So it's going to be very difficult to prove incitement.
That's not according to me.
That's according to Barbara McQuaid, former U.S.
attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and a current professor at University of Michigan Law School.
Especially because, again, this is First Amendment-protected activity.
Saying, I want you to go march over to the Capitol building and peacefully protest, that's clearly First Amendment-protected activity.
Okay, so what are the other possibilities here?
Well, theoretically, conspiracy to defraud the United States.
So, the basic definition of that crime would be two or more people working to undermine a core function of government.
It requires proving fraudulent intent, right?
The intent here is the part that's hard to prove.
If it were just, Donald Trump worked with other people to try to overturn the results of the election, well, then, Pretty obvious that that is true.
I mean, he was clearly trying to do that.
He was doing that publicly.
The question is whether he knew that he had lost the election, not should have known, knew that he lost the election, and whether he was overtly attempting to overthrow the results of the election, knowing that the election had come out against him.
And the answer there is unclear, because again, Donald Trump and intent, not the best of friends.
Donald Trump probably believes that, like, don't you believe?
I believe that Donald Trump thinks today that he won the election.
I don't think Donald Trump is sitting in a backroom somewhere at Mar-a-Lago going, man, I really lost that election, but I'm enjoying all the chaos.
Like, I don't think that's what Donald Trump thinks.
I think he's sitting in the backroom of Mar-a-Lago right now saying, I won the election and no one believes me.
It was stolen.
It was fraud.
I think that he believes what he says.
Like, this is one of the key things about Trump.
He mostly says what he thinks.
There is no brain to mouth filter in that guy.
And so his capacity to say, dissemble, that he actually knows that he lost the election, but now he's trying to Trump it.
He's trying to Trump the election, no pun intended, with fraudulent activity.
That's gonna be very difficult to prove as well.
McQuaid says, quote, if he knew he was lying about election fraud and nonetheless sought to disrupt the transfer of power, that crime theoretically could be established.
This is what the January 6th committee is trying to show.
I've been playing a bunch of clips of people saying that they went to Trump and told him he lost, but that's assuming that Trump has ears that listen.
And again, these are very questionable propositions.
I mean, Donald Trump is not famous for listening to advice.
That is not his thing.
It is both his charm and his drawback.
He is not somebody who is open-minded about receiving criticism.
Anybody who criticizes Donald Trump generally finds themselves directly in Donald Trump's crosshairs.
So, when it comes to criminal charges against President Trump, intent crimes are particularly hard to prove.
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Okay, how about conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding?
According to The Grid, evidence presented at the committee's hearings show that Trump was informed he lost the election but whipped an armed crowd into a frenzy.
So, a charge that could stem from Trump's efforts that culminated in the disruption would be put in a civil legal filing.
So, theoretically, they would argue that Trump violated a statute, federal section 1512c2, which criminalizes obstruction or attempted obstruction of an official proceeding.
But in order to do that, you again have to show that Donald Trump coordinated with people to officially obstruct the joint session of Congress to certify the election on January 6th.
And there's no evidence of that yet.
You would have to show that he was actually conspiring to stop the counting of the votes on January 6th by sending armed people into the Capitol building.
We're unarmed people in the Capitol building, or whatever.
But that has not been proved yet, right?
Those dots have never been shown by the January 6th committee.
Okay, so the final ditch attempt here is going to be state election law.
And this is the one where, theoretically, they have the most evidence, right?
State election law could theoretically fall under certain sections of, say, Georgia law, where you're attempting to subvert election law in the state of Florida by soliciting election fraud.
So the idea here would be the phone call, the famous phone call that he had with the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, in which he said, I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.
Now, again, the problem with this is that it's sort of an intent crime, meaning that there are two ways to read that conversation.
One is, I know I lost.
Go find the votes somewhere.
Go find them in a box.
Go get them.
That's one way to read it.
The other is, I know I won the state, and you guys are just not doing your job.
And if you actually did your job, you'd know I won.
So find me the votes, the show that I won, because I know I won.
Which is not actually election fraud.
That's just him being wrong.
And it's First Amendment protected activity.
So all of these charges are extraordinarily dicey.
And then, of course, there's the one that the left loves the most, which is seditious conspiracy.
The idea that he was working to overthrow the United States.
Or prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.
And there, you would actually have to show that he was coordinating with, say, the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers to invade the building.
And now, again, you can see how weak these charges are.
You can see how difficult it's going to be for Mayor Garland to prove these charges at all.
And you can see how much of a problem this is, which suggests that this is far less about charging Donald Trump criminally for stuff for which he is criminally liable, and far more about the electioneering of it.
That if Merrick Garland brings charges, Democrats are hopeful that that will impact election 22, election 2024, in the same way that, for example, James Comey announcing that he had reopened the investigation to Hillary's laptop may have cost her the election in 2016.
So they're hoping for a sort of reversal of fortune here, whereby if Merrick Garland announces that he's criminally investigating Trump, That somehow it will drive people away from Trump's camp.
Or if he actually criminally investigates Trump and criminally charges Trump, that will take Trump off the board for 2024, particularly.
Or at the very least, it'll make it center of everybody's attention in 2022.
That if we are focused in on January 6th, then we're not going to be focused in on the fact that we are currently in a recession by the usual metrics.
And this ties into the broader Democratic argument they've been making for a while here, which is that Republicans are a threat to democracy.
So Eddie Glaude, who teaches over at Georgetown, he says, you know, I'm worried that people won't be able to vote at all if Republicans, if Republicans win.
Now, this line of attack has been completely unsuccessful for Democrats.
If you look at the polling data, a vast minority of Americans, I'm talking like single digit Americans, like six, seven, 5%, are people who believe that election fraud and subversion of democracy are the chief issues on the ballot in the election.
And many of those people, by the way, are Republican.
A bunch of Republicans who think that election fraud and subversion of democracy are happening from the left.
So the idea that this is going to be the tip of the spear in 2022 for Democratic hopes?
Very, very unlikely.
But Democrats are pushing it anyway.
Here's Eddie Glaude doing just that on MSNBC.
How worried are you about the ability for Americans to cast their ballots this fall and beyond?
Oh, I'm extraordinarily worried.
The assault on voting impacts our democracy.
It's not enough to just simply declare that we must vote more Democrats into office.
Wherever you are on the ideological spectrum in this regard.
To understand how this has impacted the landscape of how people vote and how votes are counted is really important.
Now, here's the thing.
Democrats don't actually believe this.
I mean, first of all, they have no basis for believing this.
I very rarely charge that people aren't sincere in their beliefs, but the vast majority of Democrats who actually are in the know Do not believe that voting is going to be shut down by Republicans.
If they did, they wouldn't, for example, be going out of their way to fund exactly the Republican candidates they think are a threat to democracy.
So even the New York Times is now reporting that House Democrats are stepping into a Western Michigan Republican primary to elevate a candidate endorsed by former President Trump against one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him.
They actually ran a $425,000 ad run.
It's the latest in a slew of Democratic efforts to draw attention to far-right candidates, hoping they'll be easier to beat in November than more mainstream Republicans.
In this case, it could also be seen as a slap to Representative Peter Mayer, the incumbent in the Grand Rapids area district who braved blowback from his own party over his vote to impeach Trump and is now fighting skullduggery from the right and the left.
The ad, which is going to start airing on Tuesday and was openly cut and funded by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, proclaims that John Gibbs, who is challenging Mayer, is too conservative for West Michigan.
But in tone and content, it's clearly meant to appeal to the pro-Trump voters in the August 2nd Republican primary, hailing Gibbs as, quote, hand-picked by Trump to run for Congress, buffing his bona fides as an aide in the Trump administration, promising that he would push that same conservative agenda in Congress, including a hard line against illegal immigration and a stand for, quote-unquote, patriotic education.
So they ran a hit ad that is not actually a hit ad.
They're running an ad against Gibbs saying, he's too conservative for Republicans.
He's just too awesome.
Don't vote for him.
Right, which is clearly an ad meant to get people to vote for John Gibbs because they think that Gibbs is more beatable in general.
Well, here is the problem.
If you guys keep saying that people are a threat to democracy, why are you elevating them?
Why are you elevating them?
All right, this is the case that I made in 2020.
It was Bernie Sanders versus Joe Biden.
Now, there's a solid case we made that Bernie Sanders was much more beatable in a general election than Joe Biden.
But as I said, multiple times during that race, I would rather have Joe Biden with a 50% shot at the presidency than Bernie Sanders with a 40% shot at the presidency.
Because if Bernie Sanders actually becomes president, the country may be finished.
And that's how radical Bernie Sanders is.
Now, it turns out Joe Biden may finish the country off all on his own, but The idea here is that if you are in the game of politics, you don't want to elevate the opponents who are the most dangerous to the republic, because there's always the off chance that they win.
Democrats did this in 2016.
They tried to elevate Donald Trump, thinking he'd be quite beatable for Hillary Clinton, and then he ended up winning.
This has happened multiple times.
Right now, Democrats, they tried to push Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.
And Doug Mastroianno might actually win his race.
He might become the governor of Pennsylvania.
Because right now he's running like within single percentage points of Josh Shapiro, the attorney general in the state of Pennsylvania.
So Democrats, you can't have both ways.
Either these people are so dangerous they can't see the light of day, or they're the most beautiful candidates and we should fund them because even if they win, is it really that bad?
But you can't have it both ways.
So Democrats obviously don't believe that this is a threat to democracy.
What this is all about, always and forever, is just the politicking.
And for Joe Biden particularly, it's about the politicking.
Because Joe Biden understands one thing and one thing only.
He wants to make Trump the opponent, right?
He needs people to talk about Trump.
If people talk about Joe Biden, Joe Biden is in serious, serious trouble.
He's been a terrible president.
He came into office, as I've said one million times, he came into office riding a wave of elements that should have made his presidency inherently successful.
All he had to do was the thing he is best at, become unconscious.
That's all he had to do.
All he had to do was enter office, go back to the basement where he spent the entire campaign, go to sleep, wake up intermittently, watch Matlock, sign a bill, go back to sleep.
That's it.
And he didn't do that.
And so you ended up with this disastrous presidency.
But when he entered office, obviously he had all these tailwinds, right?
He had a vaccine that was working.
He had the fact that COVID was going to end and everybody was going to go back to work.
He had an economy that had been put into an artificial coma, but was the strongest it had ever been in my lifetime before it went into the artificial coma.
All he had to do was go hands off and he couldn't do it.
So that means that he has to redirect to Trump.
And so that's why you're seeing Joe Biden being wheeled out in front of the cameras and staring glassy-eyed into the camera and talking about how Trump is a threat to democracy.
Trump hasn't been president of the United States since January of 2021.
It's been a while here, gang.
It's now July of 2022.
So why is Joe Biden still talking about January 6th?
The answer is he needs you to think about January 6th so you don't think about him.
So here is Joe Biden.
I mean, this is a really weird clip.
Here's Joe Biden talking about Donald Trump yesterday.
You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-cop.
You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy.
You can't be pro-insurrection and pro-American.
Donald Trump lacked the courage to act.
The brave women and men in blue all across this nation should never forget that.
Lifeless eyes.
Black eyes.
Like a doll's eyes.
I also love the vocal fry there.
He's so clearly not well.
Donald Trump is a grizzled police veteran who's been on the force for too long and has seen too many things and smoked too many cigarettes.
You see an ashtray filled with smoked cigarettes over here and a glass of whiskey over here.
Let me tell you something about Donald Trump.
You can't be pro-police.
He is not with us, gang.
That dude is not with us.
This is the big problem for Joe Biden.
Every time he tries to make a case, he just underscores the case of why he shouldn't be president.
Every time he is on camera, it is a case against why he should be president of the United States.
He can talk all he wants about Donald Trump, and it ain't gonna help him.
It also ain't gonna help him when he says he's pro-police.
His entire party, five minutes ago, was pushing defund the police.
His vice president tried to bail out rioters in the middle of the Black Lives Matter riots in Minneapolis.
So, uh, no.
I don't believe you, that you are now pro-police and you are the moderate.
I also don't believe you're alive.
And they keep, they keep wheeling this guy out, and he's pretty obviously an ambulatory corpse.
I mean, they're pretty obviously taking him in the back room, and they're using galvanic electricity to like...
Like they would on a frog leg.
Get him out there.
I'm telling you.
Then runs out of electricity and they have to cut like they did in the middle of that particular clip.
And they have to hit him again with electricity and wake him up.
It's it's real bad.
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There is a reason why a poll shows that 75% of Democratic voters want somebody other than Joe Biden in 2024.
That's always great.
That's always great for you when you're the incumbent president of the United States and you won a fairly sweeping popular vote victory over your opponent and three-quarters of your party wants you to go away.
According to CNN, 75% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters want the party to nominate someone other than President Biden in the 2024 election, a sharp increase from earlier this year.
The poll comes as Biden's approval ratings remain low.
Most Americans are disconcerted with the state of the country and the economy.
Inflation remains high.
A new report released Tuesday showed consumer confidence slipping for the third straight month.
24% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters said they want someone else because they don't think Biden can win in 2024.
That's up from 18%.
In a poll conducted in January and February, 32% feel that way because they don't want Biden to be reelected.
At all.
Which is, uh oh.
So you got 24% of Democrats who don't think he can win.
You have another 32% who don't want him to win.
Uh, whoa.
And 25% said they prefer Biden as the nominee.
That is a steep drop from 45% in January and February.
The poll shows a sharp downward turn in enthusiasm for a 2024 re-election bid by the president.
In January and February, 51% of Democrats said they wanted someone other than Biden.
Now 31% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters 45 years and older would prefer Biden to be the 2024 nominee.
So even old Democrats are like, no.
We want him to leave.
If you're under 45, only 18% want Joe Biden to be the 2024 nominee.
Which, by the way, suggests somebody should primary him.
I mean, really, it suggests that while the Democratic Party is declaring that he is the shoe-in nominee, I'm not so sure.
I mean, if you've got an insurrection candidate like AOC running against Joe Biden in a primary, I'm not sure that goes great for Joe Biden.
And I don't see how it hurts AOC.
I would not be surprised whatsoever.
I mean, AOC is obviously not brokering for power inside the mainstream Democratic Party.
She's not making nice of Nancy Pelosi.
She's not doing her committee assignments.
She's not particularly worried about making friends.
She's more interested in the Instagram of it all.
And what that means is you could easily see a very young, fresh-faced, so-fresh-so-faced AOC primarying Joe Biden, even if Joe Biden were to run in 2024.
The big problem for Democrats, of course, is that if Joe Biden isn't there, he is masking the internal rot of a party that has no one backing him up.
And the people who are supposedly going to back him up here are people like Pete Buttigieg.
There is a new poll out showing that Pete Buttigieg, in a primary in New Hampshire, would actually edge out Joe Biden right now.
The incumbent president, among New Hampshire Democrats, they say 17% would choose Buttigieg among a list of Democrats or those who caucus with Democrats.
He received 16% support, followed by Elizabeth Warren and Gavin Newsom, who each came in at 10%.
A handful of other Democrats, in addition to Bernie Sanders, received less than 10%.
The polling further demonstrates Democrats are not wedded to the idea of choosing Biden as their nominee in the next presidential cycle.
Now, Buttigieg is not going to—he's enough of a party man, and he knows that it's not his time yet unless Biden steps aside.
So the chances that he is actually going to jump in against Joe Biden are extraordinarily low.
But it also demonstrates, once again, the divides inside the Democratic Party.
New Hampshire is extremely white.
The base of the Democratic Party is very, very black by demographics.
And what that means, I mean, this is why Joe Biden ended up winning in the Democratic primaries.
Remember, Bernie Sanders won the first couple of Democrats, he won Iowa, and he won New Hampshire.
So it is not a shock that Joe Biden would lose to Pete Buttigieg inside New Hampshire.
Right now, by the way, only 31% of Democrats in New Hampshire want Joe Biden to run in 2024.
Only 20% overall in New Hampshire want Joe Biden to run in 2024.
Right now, Buttigieg edges out Biden 17 to 16 among those candidates.
Those are bad numbers.
It is also worth noting here that the general favorable and unfavorable ratings for every Democrat are really, really bad.
Really bad.
So, for example, Pete Buttigieg in New Hampshire right now, he has a net negative 8% rating in that same poll that shows that he is more popular than Biden.
Among all New Hampshire voters, he's 8 points underwater.
Kamala Harris, by the way, is, um...
I believe 42 points underwater with New Hampshire voters, 63% disapprove, 21% approve.
Ooh, that is, yeah, that is a big owie.
Ouch.
Oh no.
By the way, you know who should be mentioned here?
The incomparable AOC in that poll of New Hampshire Democratic voters has 5%.
She's 1% below Kamala Harris.
In that Democratic poll.
Speaking of which, Kamala Harris continues to demonstrate how terrible she is at this.
By the way, that would not prohibit Kamala Harris from being the nominee.
I think everybody is looking past the point that Jim Clyburn, who basically decides the Democratic Party nominee in places like South Carolina, because that's exactly what happened with Joe Biden, right?
He intervened with Joe Biden.
He tried to get the states that have more of a black Democratic base to vote for Joe Biden.
You think he's going to get behind Pete Buttigieg, the whitest person ever to white?
The small-town Indiana mayor who couldn't fill potholes but also is gay?
You really think that Jim Clyburn is going to be backing Pete Buttigieg in a primary against Kamala Harris?
So you've got an infight between Pete Buttigieg, whose most notable achievement as Secretary of Transportation is not solving any of the supply chain issues, but also taking paternity leave and talking about why the Bible says gay marriage is okay.
Major accomplishments there from your Secretary of Transportation.
Versus Kamala Harris, maybe the most unpopular and untalented politician ever to walk this earth.
She makes Nero look like a populist.
Here is Kamala Harris yesterday explaining her pronouns to an assembled group at a meeting.
Oh my goodness.
I want to welcome these leaders for coming in to have this very important discussion about some of the most pressing issues of our time.
I am Kamala Harris.
My pronouns are she and her.
I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.
My goodness.
You know how fast that moved from faculty lounges to the White House?
That took about half a second.
First of all, her entire pitch for being on the ticket is that she is she-her.
If you don't know that Kamala Harris is a woman at this point, you're an idiot.
But apparently Kamala Harris has to announce it to the world again in fealty to gender ideology.
Supposedly the reason that she is talking about who she is in her blue suit is because she is speaking to the blind.
I look forward to her using American Sign Language to also explain to folks who are deaf there.
And she's doing it herself, right?
So why not?
Why not?
In any case, she is very, very bad at this and way too far left for the American people.
So this is why they have to keep trotting out the corpse of Joe Biden.
Prop L sit on that horse and just run him out there and hope nobody notices that he died a couple of years ago and that he's beginning to...
Smell a little bit.
In any case, Joe Biden's press secretary, in other news, is now leaving the White House.
First of all, I don't know why Joe Biden has a press secretary.
I don't know why the First Lady has an official position at all.
If you go back to the foundations of the country, the job of the First Lady was basically to throw parties because she wasn't elected to do anything.
By the way, it would be the reverse if it were first gentlemen.
If they're a female president and the husband were out there making political speeches, I'd be like, no one elected you.
Why do we care what you have to say?
This nonsense where we pretend that the first lady actually has a political position is highly, highly irritating.
It's irritating because again, no one elected these people to do anything.
But Joe Biden apparently has a press secretary named Michael La Rosa and he's now being forced out of the White House.
So I do love the fact that Joe Biden will not fire any of his top advisors for running the worst presidency in my lifetime easily.
But Joe Biden will can... You write a speech where she calls Mexican people tacos and she will can your ass?
Man, you are dead in the water.
The first lady told CNN for nearly three years from the campaign to the White House, Michael has brought an encyclopedic knowledge of politics and media to my team as my spokesperson and advisor. On a small team, loyalty and friendship are lifelong.
We'll miss Michael. However, we are excited for him to begin a new chapter in his career as a manager at Chipotle. She didn't say the last part.
La Rosa actually is joining the public affairs from Hamilton Place Strategies.
So that that revolving door continues to move forward.
La Rosa actually had to apologize on behalf of the First Lady after she compared Latinos to breakfast tacos, which I don't even know, did she mean breakfast burritos?
Maybe I'm ignorant.
I'm almost certainly ignorant, but at least I'm not ignorant enough to call people of Latino heritage by foods that I associate with them.
But we bid a fond farewell to Michael LaRosa, the Press Secretary for the First Lady of the United States, who is, in fact, the world's greatest doctor.
And meanwhile, the economy continues to be in the dollar's arms.
The IMF is now warning that a global recession is at hand.
Again, this is the reason why Joe Biden is focusing in with his glassy-eyed stare, thousand-yard stare on Donald Trump, laser-like.
I mean, sure, the eyes are going in different directions at this point, but, you know, he's still focusing in on Donald Trump because what else is he gonna talk about?
The economy?
According to the IMF, the world could soon be on the brink of a global recession as the economies of the United States, China, and Europe slow more sharply than anticipated amid a collision of crises, the IMF warned on Tuesday, as according to the New York Times.
In an update of the World Economic Outlook, the IMF said economic prospects had darkened significantly in recent months as war in Ukraine, inflation, and a resurgent pandemic inflicted pain on every continent.
If the thicket of threats continues to intensify, the world economy faces one of its weakest years since 1970, a period of intense stagflation around the globe.
Remember that time, like, six weeks ago, when the economic experts said, no, we'll probably avoid a recession?
Oh, no, it'll probably be fine.
Now the IMF is like, doom!
Tsunami!
Pierre-Olivier Gorinchas, the IMF's chief economist, said, the world may soon be teetering on the edge of a global recession only two years after the last one.
He said the outlook for the global economy is quote increasingly gloomy.
The IMF downgraded its global growth forecast from its April projections expecting output will fall to 3.2% in 2022 from 6.1% last year.
Growth is expected to slow even further next year as central banks around the world raise interest rates in an effort to tame inflation by cooling their economies.
Inflation is rising more rapidly and broadly than the IMF anticipated earlier this year and now expects prices to rise 6.6% in rich countries and 9.5% in emerging markets and developing countries.
By the way, huge companies are taking a massive hit.
Alphabet's profit, which is the owner company for Google, it dropped 14% in Q2, which is a disastrous drop.
That is a massive dump in terms of profitability.
Microsoft is reporting earnings that fall short of already reduced expectations.
The tech giant said that it had $51.9 billion in sales in the quarter ending June 30th.
That's up 12% from a year earlier.
But the results missed even Microsoft's own reduced expectations.
In early June, the company lowered its guidance for the quarter to account for the increasingly strong U.S.
dollar.
So, the economic fallout has begun.
The good news is that the Biden administration, you know, being on top of things, they've sent out all of their advisors to whistle past the graveyard here and say, everything is fine.
Biden's chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Cecilia Rouse, she says, you know what?
It's probably okay.
And also, you know what this is about?
It's about Putin and COVID.
Weird, because it seemed like things were getting bad before Putin and well after we had a vaccine for COVID, but sure, why not?
Again, the rule in the Biden White House is if something bad is happening, it's Putin and COVID.
If those bad things reverse, it's because Joe Biden is amazing at things.
It's pretty incredible how that works.
Here's Biden's chair of the CEA.
There's no question that these are challenging economic times.
The president has acknowledged as such.
He recognizes that we're addressing high inflation, and he understands the cost that that has for families.
This economy that we are facing is the result of a pandemic, this pandemic that remains with us, as well as Russia's war on Ukraine.
We know that that has disrupted our economic system, that has disrupted global markets as well.
Yeah, it's all about everybody else.
It's not their policy at all.
Everything is fine.
Brian Deese, he says that the economy is transitioning.
They always have their new language, right?
Inflation is transitory, transitory, transitory, transitory, transitory.
Okay, and then it turns out inflation was not transitory.
And they're like, recession is not inevitable, not inevitable, not inevitable.
And now their new one is that the economy is transitioning, transitioning, transitioning.
They all have to say the same thing over and over and over in the hopes that you will start to believe it, but it's not believable.
So here's Brian Deese saying that the economy is merely transitioning, folks.
It used to be male, now it will be female.
Here's Brian Deese.
We're in a transition and it feels unique because it is unique.
We have never come out of a global pandemic while dealing with the economic impacts of a land war in Europe.
So we are in unique territory, but I think where we are now is coming through a transition from what has been a truly historically fast period of economic growth and job growth, transitioning to something that we certainly hope and our aim is to be more stable growth.
But the key thing right now is that as we are in this transition, the choices we make now, the policy choices we make now, whether we actually take more action to lower prices and make things more affordable for families, these will help determine how successful we are at actually making that transition to a place where we are in more stable growth without giving up all of those economic gains that we've made.
There's so much transitioning happening here.
The only way to address a depressed and upset economy is by suggesting economic-affirming healthcare.
That's the only way.
It's like gender-affirming care, but for the economy.
All you have to do is lop off a few economic parts here and there, and then magically it has transitioned into a brand new economy.
Does it look great and new to you?
Well, speaking of transition, it's time to transition away from auto parts stores.
You're going there.
Waiting in line for 20 minutes to get to the front, there's some guy who doesn't know more about cars than you do, and then he looks up the part that you need on his computer, and then he orders it and upcharges you.
Or, you could just go to the experts at rockauto.com.
They know auto parts, and all they sell is auto parts and related tools.
Rock Auto is a family business founded by automotive engineers over 20 years ago.
Their original goal was, and still is, to make auto parts available and affordable, so customers can keep their daily drivers and classics safely on the road.
RockAuto.com's online parts catalog is uniquely easy to use.
You quickly see all the parts available for your specific car, SUV, or truck.
There are photos, specs, and installation tips to help you pick the best parts to meet your vehicle's needs.
RockAuto.com will not only have the part, but usually will give you several trusted brands to choose from.
RockAuto's kits are also popular because they bundle together all the parts necessary for a successful repair.
You don't get halfway through installing a timing belt and then discover you need another pulley.
Professional mechanics and do-it-yourselfers always pay the same at reliably low prices.
Go to rockauto.com.
Get the brakes, shocks, carpet, wipers, headlights, mirrors, mufflers, lug nuts, or any other part you need.
Be sure when you check out, right, Shapiro, in their How Did You Hear About Us box, so they know that I sent you.
Again, that is rockauto.com.
Go check them out right now.
Okay, folks.
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While the Biden administration keeps saying transition over and over and over again, like it's an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race, it turns out that people don't care about the They are just getting hammered by inflation, according to Joe Kroll, writing for Daily Wire.
Inflation in big cities is crushing residents right now.
It's even worse in rural America.
Rural households are more vulnerable to inflation.
A report from Iowa State University shows.
In 2020, rural households' post-tax incomes stood at $58,000.
About 82% of rural incomes went toward expenses.
Leaving about $10,600 in discretionary income for savings and unanticipated expenses.
However, by 2022, expenses rose by 18.5% overall.
Earnings were not able to keep pace with inflation, rising only 6.1%.
The net effect cut rural discretionary incomes by 49% between June 2020 and June 2022, reducing the cushion to $5,000.
between June 2020 and June 2022, reducing the cushion to five grand.
Expenses now consume 91% of rural take-home pay.
So things are going amazing.
Those are precisely the areas where Joe Biden radically underperformed in 2020, and is unlikely to radically overperform come 2024.
And apparently, Democrats' answer is to fixing the economy.
Let's spend tons of money!
We're in an inflationary cycle, and the economy is already starting to enter the doldrums.
What if we tax people more, borrow more, and spend more?
Makes perfect sense.
And this will be treated as a victory by the media, which of course doesn't know anybody who lives in rural America.
It's always amusing when the media try to talk about what's happening in rural America.
It's like, what if we send, we gotta send Steve Irwin out there to go see what all the people in flyover country are doing.
Oh my god, there are people who still farm for a living.
What do we do?
Look at that man, he's milking a cow.
It's a strange, primitive practice by which people grow food from the ground.
That's how they see people in rural America.
They go to church.
It's a building with a big T on top.
We don't know why.
We'll have to investigate.
The media always treat it like people who are outside the big cities don't matter at all.
But those people vote.
And so they're calling it a big win in the media that Joe Biden is about to pass a bunch of garbage via Congress.
But here's the thing.
It ain't gonna be a big win.
According to the Washington Post, The first major prescription drug legislation in 20 years.
More than $50 billion to subsidize computer chip manufacturing and research.
A bill that would enshrine protection for same-sex marriage.
After a turbulent stretch in which much of President Biden's legislative agenda seemed to be foundering, the president and his party may be on the cusp of significant wins in Congress.
The White House hopes will provide at least a modest political boost.
Most resonant is the bill to let Medicare negotiate drug prices, a hugely popular idea Democrats have been pursuing for more than 20 years.
It would let Medicare negotiate prices for 10 drugs in 2026 and 10 more in 2029, forbid drug companies from raising prices faster than inflation, and cap Medicare recipients' out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs at $2,000 a year.
All of which sounds fantastic until you realize that subsidy is going to be ongoing.
It's going to cost a ton of money because you'll have to subsidize this in order so that drug companies continue to actually provide new drugs.
It turns out when they cut the profitability of the drug companies, which is not massive, by the way, the profit margin is not enormous.
And when you do that, what you end up doing is cutting down on the R&D that actually allows for better drugs to be provided to market.
Meanwhile, these others were, quote unquote, big winners.
Like, for example, a bill that would enshrine protection for same-sex marriage.
That's a big political winner for you?
Really?
Is it?
To whom, precisely?
To whom?
Democrats thought abortion was going to be a big winner.
They think they want an even bigger winner?
Try the idea that you're going to run on same-sex marriage.
I'm sure that's going to be a huge political winner for you while the economy is in the tank.
Democrats hope these measures earn a bigger political payoff than, say, Biden's infrastructure law, which seemed to make little impression on voters.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Probably passing a same-sex marriage bill is going to have more impact on voters in your direction than passing, like, a $1 trillion bill on infrastructure.
In fact, more cowbell always seems to be the solution from the Democrats.
But none of this is going to help the economy.
Because if you actually wanted to help the economy, what you would do is you would, yes, raise the interest rates to cut off inflation.
You would do so subtly.
But what you would also do is loosen up the damned economy.
You would make it easier for people to invest in oil and gas wells.
You would make it easier for people to invest their money in startup companies.
You would get rid of the highly burdensome regulatory structure that governs nearly every area of American life.
You would lower the tax rates.
That's what would get people back into investing in the economy.
Get people hiring, get people spending.
The way that that happens is by providing a baseline level of economic security for people who make good decisions with their money.
But that's precisely the opposite of what they are doing.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board gets this right.
They say, considering the mess we're in, an economic paradigm shift is in order.
The democratic economic strategy of vast government spending and easy money has failed.
A better agenda would let the Fed target stable prices, while policymakers on Capitol Hill and the White House Target incentives for growth to counter the tighter money that will be required to reduce inflation.
What would that mean?
Take all the tax increases and more government entitlements off the table.
Put a moratorium on new regulations.
Declare an end to the White House war on fossil fuels.
Reduce tariffs.
Cut trade deals with Britain, Japan, and others in the Asia-Pacific that want the U.S.
as a trading alternative to China.
Then make permanent the tax cuts in the 2017 reform that expire 2025.
Democrats obviously won't do any of this now.
If Republicans take over Congress, that would be the good move for Joe Biden going into 2024.
Is he going to do that?
Highly unlikely.
Because again, the media are pushing him toward more radicalism because they are utterly disconnected from the experiences of everyday Americans.
When members of the Biden team say transition, members of the media say how high.
That really is how this works.
The Biden administration declared that recession is no longer two quarters of negative growth.
The AP immediately ran a piece suggesting that recession is not two quarters of negative growth.
The media are not actually providing a service to Democrats.
When you bubble people off from the outside world, it actually makes them more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of politics when the real world clocks them directly in the face.
Now, meanwhile, here is the thing.
We are, right now, engaged in Cold War II.
And right now in the United States, we may not want to acknowledge it, what we have with China is Cold War II.
China is extraordinarily aggressive.
China is stealing intellectual property at an incredible rate.
China is solidifying its hold on the South China Sea.
China is cutting deals with places like the Solomon Islands, creating a barricade, a naval barricade effectively around Australia.
China is threatening Taiwan.
They're preparing the invasion.
I mean, there's no question that China, if they could get away with it, would invade right now.
And China is preparing to subject the American economy to a massive gut punch should we actually try to fight this Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Now Taiwan, for its own part, is holding drills amid concerns about Nancy Pelosi visiting.
According to the Associated Press, Taiwan's capital staged air raid drills on Monday, its military mobilized for routine defense exercises coinciding with concerns over a forceful Chinese response to a possible visit to the island by the U.S.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
While there is no direct link between China's renewed threats and Taiwan's defensive moves, they underscore the possibility of a renewed crisis in the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan Mayor Ko Wen-je told reporters, quote, in recent years, Chinese military planes have frequently harassed Taiwan.
The war between Russia and Ukraine broke out in February this year.
All these things make us understand the importance of being vigilant in times of peace.
We need to be prepared if there is war.
Pelosi has not confirmed when or if she's going to visit, but the Chinese government is screaming about this, suggesting that the United States has to prepare a military response if Pelosi should visit.
Joe Biden said last week that military officials believed such a trip was, quote, unquote, not a good idea, which is always a great move.
And undercutting the picture of American strength in the face of Chinese aggression is always a good move if you are the President of the United States.
U.S.
law requires Washington to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself and treat all threats to the island as matters of grave concern that remains ambiguous on what exactly we would do in case of an attack from China.
The big problem here is that the U.S.
has undercut its own naval power.
We have fewer ships on the water right now than we did in 1938.
Before World War II.
Now, ships are significantly more powerful, but the projective power of the United States Navy has been massively reduced under consecutive presidents.
Trump tried to build it up.
He succeeded a little bit, but particularly, Barack Obama had radically sliced the U.S.
Navy, which means that the Navy doesn't have the power, really, to fight the Chinese in the waters near China.
During a visit to Indonesia on Sunday, U.S.
General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the Chinese military has become significantly more aggressive and dangerous over the past five years.
Milley's Chinese counterpart, General Li Xiuquan, told him in a call earlier this month Beijing had no room for compromise on issues like Taiwan.
On Monday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Beijing had repeatedly expressed its solemn position over a potential visit by Pelosi, Zhao said, we are fully prepared.
If the U.S.
is bent on going its own way, China will take firm and strong measures to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.
What they mean by that is they'll invade Taiwan because they believe that Taiwan is part of China, despite the fact that Taiwan has effectively been an independent polity since Mao Zedong took over mainland China.
China has not said what specific actions it would take.
Speculation is centered on a new round of threatening military exercises or even an attempt to prevent Pelosi's plane from landing by declaring a no-fly zone over Taiwan.
This is probably some huffing and puffing economic punishment of Taiwan, according to Michael Mazza, defense and China expert at the American Enterprise Institute.
But you can see that the China, which has to strengthen itself, it has to, because here's the thing, time does not bode well for China.
China actually does not have time on its side.
It's still reliant on a communist infrastructure that undercuts its economic growth.
China is relying on basically old school mercantilist principles in order to strengthen itself, but they are basing themselves on debt.
They are attempting to overcome a massive demographic problem they created with their one-child policy.
China is completely demographically upside down.
They have an extraordinarily old population and not enough young people to actually pay the bills on this sort of stuff.
And what this means is that Xi, who has gotten more militant with the outside world, not less, that he has to get more aggressive.
Because the only way that he's going to be able to maintain his power inside the Communist Party there is to demonstrate his Mao Zedong-like territorially aggressive instincts.
In the same way that Vladimir Putin, in order to uphold his rule, is very territorially aggressive, right?
He has not actually opened up his economy or made life better for Russians.
So what that means is national greatness is now on the table.
Same thing for Xi Jinping.
And so they're prepping.
I mean, it's very clear what they are doing here.
They are clearly prepping for a war.
The reason that you can tell that they are prepping for a war is because of what they are doing with semiconductors.
So right now, the Chinese have been, as we've talked about, attempting to generate extraordinary semiconductor capacity inside their own country.
China apparently is going to lead global semiconductor growth by 2030, according to Investment Monitor.
They say that China is going to Lead the global semiconductor industry by 2030 due to its growing market size and domestic production capacity.
So there's two aspects of semiconductors.
One is semiconductor design.
China really lags there.
They don't make advanced semiconductors.
They're not capable of innovating.
You know, for all the talk about China creating 77,000 or 7700, for all the talk about China creating tons and tons of STEM graduates, we're going to go into the hard sciences.
The truth is that China is not good at innovation.
China is very good at copying and manufacture.
That is why products that you get are cheap manufacturers from China, generally.
And so when it comes to semiconductors, China is creating very, very basic semiconductors, not the advanced semiconductors that are produced particularly in Taiwan and South Korea.
Now, there's only one problem with this.
If they're produced in Taiwan and South Korea, and China were to invade Taiwan, one of two things happens.
Either China takes over Taiwan's semiconductor capacity, which means suddenly China is the global leader in semiconductors, which is a disaster for the United States and for its allies.
Because semiconductors are in everything.
They're in your cell phone, they're in your computer, they're in your car.
Every sophisticated piece of technology you have is rooted in semiconductors.
And those are being produced right now.
Really, the advanced ones, like the really good ones, are being produced in Taiwan and South Korea.
If China were to invade Taiwan, Taiwan has two choices.
One, all those resources fall into the hands of China.
Two, they fry all the semiconductors in an attempt to avoid giving them to the Chinese.
If that happens, you know who else doesn't have the semiconductors?
We don't.
Then China is still the producer of kind of the next best thing and lots of them.
And so this has led the United States to finally belatedly realize that it needs to reshore all of its options.
If it's not going to defend Taiwan properly, it's not going to build up militarily, it's not going to build up its own economy, then the United States had damn well better get into the business of manufacturing It's own semiconductors, which is why you are seeing Congress, I would say belatedly, attempting to reshore chip manufacturing in the United States.
Now, I know this is actually a controversial area on the right.
There's some people like the Wall Street Journal is very much against the idea of subsidizing the domestic manufacture of chips inside the United States.
But here's the problem.
This is an actual national security issue in the same way that it is a national security issue for the United States to be energy independent.
It is a national security situation for the United States not to be dependent on China and places that are really on the brink of falling to China in terms of semiconductors.
Because if we lose our access to semiconductors, we're toast.
We have a serious international relations and military prowess problem.
There's a piece by Farrah Stockman, member of the editorial board over the New York Times, talking about this.
She says semiconductors, the tiny computer chips that run everything from smartphones to satellites to missile defense systems, are often called the oil of the 21st century. Maintaining U.S. economic and military might depends on a reliable supply. Semiconductor shortages during the pandemic brought some car assembly lines to a halt, left showrooms of home appliances barren, providing a glimpse of what would happen to the American economy if those chips ever ran out.
Semiconductor industry is so important it factors into decisions about war and peace.
92% of the world's most advanced chips are made in Taiwan.
The rest come from South Korea.
Repeated warnings by President Xi Jinping of China that he's willing to use force to reassert control over Taiwan have forced U.S.
policymakers to contemplate what would happen if the U.S.
military was ever cut off from the chips that it needs.
Since the Trump administration cut off certain chips from going to China, chips have become fodder for public debate.
Now Americans are worried about their own chip supply.
The CHIPS Act would give $39 billion to subsidize the construction of semiconductor factories in the United States, plus $11 billion for research and development initiatives into chip innovation.
That is the centerpiece of a bill to increase U.S.
competitiveness expected to move forward in Congress this summer.
There's a reason why this is going to receive some bipartisan support.
Is it corporate welfare?
Of course.
But the places that make chips, including Taiwan, South Korea, India, Germany, and China, offset the enormous capital costs with gobs of public money.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether that's a good thing, but if the U.S.
wants to compete, subsidies are the price of admission.
But paying off companies isn't going to get us very far.
We actually have to build a pipeline for talent on these particular issues.
We don't have enough experienced workers when it comes to chip manufacture.
The Trump administration has been pressuring the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to build a fab on U.S.
soil capable of mass-producing advanced chips.
Finding people in Arizona with the same skills and work ethic as exist right now in Taiwan has been a challenge, according to the company's founder, Morris Chang.
Attracting highly skilled foreign workers is essential, at least in the short term.
The bottom line here is that the The Chinese have a geographic advantage on this particular issue.
And so we are going to need to make some aggressive moves in terms of ensuring our own semiconductor industry if we actually are going to challenge China and prevent China from invading Taiwan.
The best defense is a good offense.
The United States having a weakened economy is going to be a very, very serious problem.
And this administration, you know, they can talk about semiconductor spending, that's all fine and good.
And I think there's a very good case for it.
Right now, for example, GM is absolutely getting smoked because of their loss of semiconductors from China.
According to the Wall Street Journal, GM's net profit tumbled 40% in the second quarter, hurt by a loss in China and supply chain troubles that left the company with tens of thousands of unfinished vehicles it could not sell during the period because of the computer chip shortage.
That just is sort of a taste of what's to come if China were to gain control over the global semiconductor supply.
So we have to do something there, but it's more than that.
We have to strengthen our economy.
And yes, we also have to start redirecting our energies from beating each other up over pronouns and toward the fact that we have a global power in China which is not rising but is increasingly aggressive over time.
And if we don't do that, then Cold War II is not likely to go in the same direction as Cold War I.
And China, if given enough time, will collapse in on itself like a dying star because their economy does not work, their demographics do not work.
But you have to contain them.
And failure to contain is going to lead China to more and more aggression and more and more longevity on the world stage in its current form.
Alrighty, we will be back here later today with additional content.
In the meantime, go check out one of our newest podcasts, Morning Wire.
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I'm Ben Shapiro.
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