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July 28, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

49:42

Happy-Talking The Recession | Ep. 1544

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	The Biden administration continues to happy talk its way through recession.
	Democrats try to prop up extremists in Republican primaries while decrying the supposed rise of extremist Republicans.
	And The View has to back off its slander of TPUSA.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	I talk about them every single show.
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	Well, folks, you may have noticed the economy is garbaggio thanks to Joe Biden and wonderful Democrats in Congress and the Federal Reserve and all the rest of our experts.
	Well, thanks to Biden, inflation, you're paying way more than you should for pretty much everything.
	Polls show 94% of Americans are upset or concerned about the impact of rising prices.
	95% believe that soaring inflation is, quote, very or somewhat serious.
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	Well, the new GDP statistics are in, and they show that we are indeed in a recession, because again, the definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
	Now, the reality is you don't actually need the stats to tell you that, because realistically speaking, most Americans already think that we are in a period of economic stagnation.
	So whether you call it a recession or you don't call it a recession, most Americans are not optimistic about the state of the economy.
	Most Americans think the economy is going the wrong way.
	Most Americans have had their wage increases eaten up by inflation.
	Many Americans are concerned that the economy is now going to slow.
	The truth is it wouldn't really have mattered for the Biden administration whether the stats came out negative or they came out positive because the reality is no matter what they say, Americans don't feel good about the economy.
	Joe Biden continues to try to happy talk his way through this one.
	What we're really looking at is stagflation.
	Whether you call it a recession or whether it's not a recession, that doesn't matter.
	What matters is that most people feel economic stagnation setting in and inflation continues to be at extraordinary highs.
	The Federal Reserve has now increased the Fed funds rate to .75, another .75 percentage, .75 basis points.
	This is another major increase by the Federal Reserve.
	This is sort of calmed the markets at least a little bit because again, Jerome Powell has suggested that he is on the pathway to a soft landing for the economy.
	I think a lot of people have doubts about that.
	Here's the Fed chair, Jerome Powell.
	We will continue to make our decisions meeting by meeting and communicating and communicate our thinking as clearly as possible.
	As the stance of monetary policy tightens further, it likely will become appropriate to slow the pace of increases while we assess how our cumulative policy adjustments are affecting the economy and inflation.
	These rate hikes have been large and they've come quickly.
	and It's likely that their full effect has not been felt by the economy.
	So there's probably some additional tightening, significant additional tightening in the pipeline.
	Now, the stock markets seem to have a bit of optimistic faith that Jerome Powell is going to get this thing under control.
	But this has happened before.
	Every time Jerome Powell announces an interest rate increase, the stock market seems to bump a little bit.
	And then a few days later, everybody gets off.
	the happy drug, and then they start to dump their stock a little bit as well.
	Bottom line is the market is in a holding pattern because we don't actually know whether the Federal Reserve is going to be able to bring down inflation without crashing the economy.
	Joe Biden continues to maintain that there is no recession, there will be no recession no matter what the economy is doing fantabulously well.
	Here's the president of the United States who is no longer sentient.
	We're not going to be in a recession in my view.
	The employment rate is still one of the lowest we've had in history, it's in the 3.6 area.
	We still find ourselves with people investing.
	My hope is we go from this rapid growth to steady growth.
	And so we'll see some coming down.
	But I don't think we're going to, God willing, I don't think we're going to see a recession.
	Yeah, well, people are not buying that, which is why the White House's Jared Bernstein is out there trying to talk about how, you know, we might be in a recession, we may not be It's really a technical conversation, but you know in your heart that everything is going fine.
	People don't know in their hearts everything is going fine.
	That is not true.
	I think we've gotten into a technical discussion about what constitutes a recession, and I think, look, bringing the facts to the table is something that we as economic advisors have to do.
	There is absolutely some tough news regarding how high inflation's been, but there's also some positive news that we should not overlook.
	I mean, the price of the pump is now $4.30 a gallon.
	That's down 70 cents off of its peak.
	Okay, that has nothing to do with Joe Biden's energy policy.
	Again, I will never get over the fact that for this administration, the idea is that magically when the prices go up, that's not Joe Biden's fault, but when the prices come down, that is Joe Biden's credit.
	It's an amazing, amazing statement.
	Meanwhile, the media are doing their best to spin on behalf of the administration.
	Politico's Ben White questioned whether a bad quarterly GDP number on Thursday would even mean that the U.S.
	is heading for a session.
	So, again, unfalsifiability is the rule in the media.
	No matter what, everything was going to be okay because, of course, Joe Biden is president.
	So Politico's Twitter account actually tweeted out, quote, set your alarms. Tomorrow we get the first possibly inaccurate and certain to be revised reading of the US economic performance in the second quarter of this deeply weird economic year.
	One metric to measure if we're in a recession. That is certainly a way to sort of rush right past the fact that the vast majority of Americans are feeling pretty insecure about the state of the economy.
	According to the New York Times, after more than a year of attempting to soothe consumer anxieties over soaring inflation, Biden administration officials have segued into a sustained public campaign to extinguish fears that the nation's economy has dipped back into recession.
	Officials keep leaning heavily on the strength of the job market and referred frequently to the criteria used by the Economic Research Committee that formally declares when recessions start and end.
	The campaign has been complicated by the Federal Reserve, which is trying to slow the economy in order to wrestle inflation under control.
	On Wednesday, the Fed Made another supersized interest rate increase, lifting rates by three quarters of a percentage point, raising the odds of a policy-induced downturn later this year.
	And they're going to have to raise the interest rates a lot more than that, because again, the baseline interest rates in the country are still 2.25, 2.5%.
	Those are not nearly the interest rates that are going to be necessary in order to drive down inflation below 7 or 8%.
	As Larry Summers, former Clinton Treasury Secretary, has suggested, that number is going to have to be more like 5 or 6% nationally before you start seeing a real decrease in the rate of inflation in the country right now.
	The fact that Biden and his aides have spent so much time fending off talk of recession shows just how glum Americans have grown about the economy, according to the New York Times, and why it's been so hard for the administration to change their minds.
	To paraphrase an old political adage, if you're explaining how recession calls are made, you're losing.
	This is correct.
	Mr. Biden has tried for more than a year to persuade Americans the economy is strong and that inflation will fade.
	He has emphasized rapid job creation and a falling unemployment rate, noting on Monday it was down to 3.6%, but Americans are not buying it.
	Consumer confidence has slumped as food, gas, and other prices soared.
	Voter dissatisfaction with Biden's economic stewardship has grown, as have attacks by Republicans who have blamed the president's policies for fueling inflation and eroding Americans' purchasing power.
	And of course, they should blame him for that, because that is precisely what he has been doing.
	And in fact, it now turns out that the Democrats are going to try to ram through another massive spending bill.
	They couldn't just agree on the spending that's actually necessary?
	Like, for example, there's a bill that is now being passed that's designed to prop up America's semiconductor industry as a matter of national security.
	I'm not against that bill.
	I think that the idea that we ought to subsidize the domestic manufacturer That is a national security issue, considering what China is doing on microchips, as we'll talk about in a little while.
	But the Democrats in Congress decided to subsume that into a $280 billion bill.
	Rather than an actual direct subsidy at like $30, $40, $50 billion, which is a lot of money for the microchip industry, instead they've decided to subsume that in a far wider bill.
	It's the same thing they did with so-called infrastructure.
	The infrastructure bill is something like $1.2 trillion, and the vast minority of that money went to actual infrastructure.
	The vast majority of it went to boondoggle nonsense for Democratic allies.
	Well now, Senator Joe Manchin, in a bizarre reversal, announced that he had agreed to include hundreds of billions of dollars for climate and energy programs and tax increases in a package to subsidize health care and lower the cost of prescription drugs less than two weeks after abruptly upending hopes for such an agreement this summer.
	According to the New York Times, the package would set aside $369 billion for climate and energy proposals, the most ambitious climate action ever taken by Congress.
	So we're going to blow more money, more subsidies into the economy.
	Makes perfect sense.
	Also, they're going to raise taxes, like an estimated $451 billion in new tax revenue over the course of the decade, while cutting federal spending on prescription drugs by $288 billion, supposedly.
	But has the federal government ever really brought down the spending on this sort of stuff?
	Not really.
	The idea is they're going to use their bargaining power through Medicare and Medicaid in order to bring down the cost of prescription drugs.
	The problem is that those prescription drug companies, they're going to have to make their money somewhere.
	So where are they going to make the money?
	And the answer is they're going to stop R&D.
	They're just going to keep selling the current drugs they have.
	Well, the R&D in the pharmaceutical industry is basically the redeeming feature of the American pharmaceutical industry.
	You get rid of the R&D, and they're just pumping out whatever they have available.
	It's just more Tylenol.
	Okay, well, Tylenol might be slightly cheaper than it was before, but it's not going to lead to the sorts of medical breakthroughs that you need in order to fight disease.
	The product of a deal announced by Manchin and Chuck Schumer, and it would reduce the federal deficit by about $300 billion, supposedly, by raising taxes.
	Now again, raising taxes in the middle of a stagnating economy is one of the dumbest things you can do.
	And blowing a bunch of money into that economy in the middle of an inflationary cycle is also one of the dumbest things you can do.
	No one understands why Manchin is doing this.
	Even the New York Times seems puzzled.
	Quote, it was not clear what had changed Mr. Manchin's mind since he said not even two weeks ago, he could not support such a package until he saw the inflation numbers for July, which are not scheduled to be issued for two more weeks.
	But quiet negotiations had resumed between Manchin, Schumer and their staffs in recent days, according to a person familiar with the talks.
	The abrupt announcement came only hours after passing a huge industrial policy bill aimed at bolstering American competitiveness with China that Senator Mitch McConnell had said he would never support as long as Democrats continued their efforts to push through their marquee domestic policy bill over GOP opposition.
	That legislation still needs to clear the House.
	Republican leaders in that chamber said they would instruct their ranks to oppose it after news of the deal.
	So the idea from McConnell was, we'll sign off on the semiconductor bill with all the poor, as long as you don't ram through a second bill.
	And Democrats are like, well, we're going to ram through a second bill anyway.
	So now, presumably, McConnell is going to fight back against that.
	The problem for McConnell, of course, is that he doesn't actually control a majority of the Senate.
	Democrats presumably will have to use one of their bullets in the reconciliation chamber in order to ram through this giant climate change boondoggle bill.
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	With the Senate divided 50-50 and Republicans uniformly opposed, Democrats need unanimous support within their party and the tie-breaking vote of Kamala Harris to pass the plan under reconciliation.
	Manchin was supposed to be the chief obstacle.
	One sort of ironic wrinkle here is that it's not clear whether Kyrsten Sinema is going to vote for it.
	According to the New York Times, Manchin's embrace of the plan did not guarantee it would move forward.
	Several senators declined to comment on the deal upon hearing of it on Wednesday evening until they learned more about it.
	That included Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat who's been another holdout on her party's domestic policy measure.
	A lot of the key liberal Democrats were rallying behind the plan.
	The tax increases would fall largely on corporations and private equity firms that would be accompanied by a crackdown on high-earning individuals and businesses that seek to avoid paying the taxes they owe.
	What do you mean seek to avoid paying the taxes they owe?
	If they owe the taxes, they have to pay the taxes.
	This notion that they're violating the law, so you have to pass a bill to cudgel the money out of them.
	If they're violating the law, the IRS would already be on their butts.
	One possible clue to Manchin's change of heart came in a line of his joint announcement with Schumer that they'd secured a commitment from Biden and Pelosi that would approve a separate measure to address the permitting of energy infrastructure, potentially including natural gas pipelines.
	So basically, in order to get some natural gas pipelines built in his home state of West Virginia, Manchin is now going to sign off on a $400 billion spending plan.
	Democrats said the Senate could take up the legislation by next week.
	It must adhere to strict budgetary rules because Democrats are going to do this under reconciliation.
	McConnell said on Twitter, Democrats have already crushed American families with historic inflation.
	Now they want to pile on giant tax hikes that will hammer workers and kill many thousands of American jobs.
	First, they killed your family's budget.
	Now they want to kill your job as well.
	Senator Lindsey Graham couldn't believe Manchin's doing it.
	He said he couldn't believe that Manchin is, quote, agreeing to a massive tax increase in the name of climate change when our economy is in a recession.
	And so what I'm hearing about the terms of this latest reconciliation deal make no sense.
	Meanwhile, Manchin said, rather than risking more inflation with trillions in new spending, this bill will cut the inflation taxes Americans are paying, lower the cost of health insurance and prescription drugs, and ensure our country invests in energy security and climate change solutions we need.
	The bill is called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which I'm sorry.
	Like, the Democrats keep doing this.
	They keep passing bills that are precisely the opposite of what they do.
	This is not an inflation reduction act.
	It contributes to inflation.
	When you spend more money, that contributes to inflation.
	There are no two ways about that.
	When you increase taxes, and then you also increase the spending, that increases the possibility of stagflation because taxation leads to, it's a disincentive to invest.
	It leads to disinvestments in the economy.
	It's a very bad bill.
	But again, Biden is actually doing, I would say, at least the smart thing for him.
	He's trying to divvy up, build back better into a bunch of different parts and then ram it through.
	Manchin preemptively swatted away a lingering demand from some House Democrats to lift the cap on state and local tax deduction as part of the final package, adding, quote, our tax code should not favor red state or blue state elites with loopholes like salt.
	The agreement is still way less than Biden originally wanted.
	The plan would raise most of its tax revenue, an estimated $313 billion, by imposing a minimum tax on the so-called book income of large corporations like Amazon and FedEx that currently use tax credits and other maneuvers to reduce their tax rates below the 21% corporate income tax rate in the United States.
	By the way, if you want to see your prices go up via Amazon and FedEx, this is an excellent way to do it because all that is going to get passed on to the consumer.
	Apparently, it is going to invest $30 billion in production tax credits for solar panels.
	Yay!
	$10 billion for tax credits to build clean technology manufacturing.
	And $500 million to be used through the Defense Production Act for heat pumps and critical minerals processing.
	Also, a means-tested $7,500 tax credit to make new electric vehicles more affordable.
	That ain't gonna cut it, guys.
	I'm sorry, a Tesla doesn't become wildly affordable for a middle-class family because of a $7,500 tax credit.
	That is not the way that works.
	A $4,000 tax credit for used electric vehicles.
	Again, this is just, it's a giant waste of money.
	The fact that Manchin signed on to it is bewildering, except that he thinks that he's getting some sort of pork barrel project from his friends over at the federal government.
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	Again, the Democrats have just one tune and they keep playing it over and over and over again.
	So, get ready for the stagflation.
	You have the Federal Reserve raising interest rates at the same exact time that you have the federal government attempting to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on green energy projects and raise tax at the same time.
	And this is just bad economic policy.
	Truly bad economic policy.
	But don't worry, at least Paul Krugman will be there at the New York Times to explain that everything is going great.
	He says, recessions are not defined by two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.
	It's possible the people who actually decide whether we're in a recession will eventually declare a recession began in the United States in the first half of the year, but that's unlikely given other economic data.
	But they're not going to base their decision solely on whether we've had two successive quarters of falling real GDP.
	Again, they're just going to keep changing the metrics.
	The bottom line is none of this helps them.
	Because if the economy continues to stagflate, the American people are going to punish the Democrats.
	Every single person knows this.
	This is not a shock in any serious way.
	And because the Democrats just keep passing bad bills, I have a feeling that stagflation is on its way for the foreseeable future here.
	The big tech companies are the first to experience the hit.
	Facebook parent MetaPlatforms, according to the Wall Street Journal, posted its first decline in revenue and issued a muted outlook on digital advertising as it contends with growing competition from TikTok.
	The company reported quarterly revenue of $28.8 billion, down almost 1% from a year earlier, slightly below the $28.9 billion Wall Street was expecting.
	It marks the first time the company has posted a quarterly drop in revenue from the year earlier.
	Mark Zuckerberg said, quote, it's always hard to predict how deep or long these cycles will be, but I'd say the situation seems worse than it did a quarter ago.
	Most Americans feel the same.
	So Democrats have to come up with some other narrative.
	It's not going to be, hey guys, we spent a lot of money.
	I am just bewildered by the Democratic determination that if they spend lots of money in the middle of an inflationary cycle with economic stagnation, that the American people are like, yeah, that sounds amazing.
	They tried this already.
	That was the infrastructure bill.
	And guess what?
	Americans hated it.
	Americans at the time were like, yeah, we like infrastructure spending.
	And five minutes later, Americans realized that that's just a carb binge.
	It's nine o'clock at night, you're really hungry, you haven't had dinner, and so you just grab eight bagels and shove them down your throat, and the next morning you're all bloated and you feel garbage-y.
	That's what always happens with these spending bills.
	Like, in the moment, you have the sugar high, and then a second later, like, oh my god, I'm so fat.
	That's exactly what the American people do with these giant spending bills.
	And Democrats seem to think that that sugar rush is representative of a long-term electoral trend.
	It is not.
	It is not.
	The only giant Democratic plans that have ever been popular are entrenched Our entrenched entitlement programs, those are the only ones that ever gain popularity over time.
	Because once Americans are addicted to the heroin of government spending, then it's very hard to get them off of it.
	But when you're talking about just these sort of spending binges, oh, we'll throw $500 billion at this.
	Oh, we'll spend $1.2 trillion on infrastructure.
	In the moment, the polling shows they're popular.
	Five seconds later, Americans are like, why are we spending all this money?
	Where'd all that money go?
	So Democrats are forced to come up with an alternative line for the elections.
	Because it can't be the economy.
	So according to Edward Isaac DeVere over at CNN Politics, their line is, get ready for it, Republicans are extreme.
	Now, again, this line is not going to work particularly well.
	It's not going to work well for a few reasons.
	One, when it comes to actual policy, it's Democrats who have the Vice President of the United States going on national television and announcing her pronouns, and the Press Secretary to the White House explaining that, quote-unquote, gender-affirming healthcare is actually a form of true healthcare for small children.
	You have to gender transition small children.
	Like, if you're talking about policy extremism, Forget about attitudinal extremism.
	Policy extremism?
	The Democratic Party?
	One of the weird gaps that's happening right now is that the Republican Party seems attitudinally extreme, but its actual policies are quite moderate.
	The Democratic Party tries to promote the idea that it is attitudinally moderate while promoting extraordinarily extreme policies.
	Well, the American people are catching on to the policy right now because you only pay attention to the attitude of a party when that party is in power.
	This is one of the secrets of American politics.
	When Donald Trump is in power, then his attitude matters an awful lot to the American people.
	When he's not in power, no one cares.
	What they care about more is the policy of the opposing party, like the people who actually are in power.
	When you're in power, both your attitude and your policies matter to the American people.
	So even if Joe Biden tries to present himself as a sort of soft moderate, his policies are very radical and everybody knows it, which is why he's getting hit.
	When Donald Trump was in power, his policies were actually fairly moderate, but his rhetoric was sort of wild.
	And so Americans paid attention to that.
	When you're not in power, people don't pay attention to either your policy or your rhetoric.
	So trying to focus attention on the fact that there are some Republicans who say crazy things, that is not likely to bear fruit for a party that is currently in power in all elected branches of the federal government and is ramming through bills that are going to increase inflation and continue to stagnate the economy.
	Nonetheless, according to CNN, seized by genuine panic about the prospect of Republicans winning control of Congress and governor's mansions across the country, multiple Democratic leaders and candidates in some of the tightest races are calling on party leaders, including Joe Biden, to focus on calling out Republicans as extremists.
	Well, I mean, he's already tried this, right?
	We already had Joe Biden out there being like, ultra mega, super duper, pooper mega, scooper pooper mega.
	And it didn't have any impact because he's the president.
	He's looking at you with those weird Coraline button eyes.
	You're like, I don't know why, why am I listening to this old man who's destroying the country while he calls everybody else extreme and appears to be in a state of semi-drug induced haze.
	So Democrats, they're fibbing about what's extreme and what's not extreme all in the pursuit of electoral gain.
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	According to CNN, they don't think Biden's poll numbers are going to go up much or inflation is going to go down much.
	But in the continuing wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade, with hundreds of election deniers on the ballot across the country, many Democratic leaders are looking to reframe the stakes of the midterms around a GOP they say has become a threat to America, arguing Republican control in states and in Congress would lead to a federal abortion ban, major rights restrictions, attacks on democracy.
	Again, this is a hypothetical based on a hypothetical.
	One of the keys to politics is that hypotheticals based on hypotheticals do not win elections.
	What people say they will do, that actually is going to win elections.
	These are hypotheticals based on hypotheticals because number one, the idea of a broad-scale federal abortion ban while Joe Biden is president of the United States is not particularly compelling.
	When you override a Biden veto, it ain't gonna happen.
	Also, if they were to pass some sort of serious federal abortion ban, there's a serious shot that the federal government in the form of the Supreme Court steps in and says no.
	And so, that's not particularly compelling.
	Major rights restrictions?
	In what way?
	In what way?
	They keep saying that Republicans are going to restrict voting rights?
	How?
	Can you show a state where people are not able to vote when they want to vote?
	According to Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, one of the leading idiots in the Senate, he said Democrats would be irresponsible, both morally and politically, if we just went with the same poll-tested stuff about delivering infrastructure.
	There's a place for all that, but these people are out of their minds and are really acting with impunity, and we need to say so.
	This is not going to work.
	It's not going to be enough to just call your opponents extremists when you're the ones in power.
	And there's another problem with this strategy.
	Okay, so the other problem with the Democratic strategy here of just calling Republicans extremists is that in primaries, Democrats keep trying to get Republicans elected who are the most extreme candidates.
	They're going out of their way to fund actual ad campaigns on behalf of the quote-unquote most extreme Republicans.
	Now, you can't say these Republicans are wild extremists.
	Also, I'm really hoping they win their primaries so that we can run against them.
	You can't do that.
	Either they're so dangerous they should be nowhere near public office, Or they or they're not that dangerous.
	Well, Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat from California, he was asked about this and he had no answer.
	He was asked, OK, so if there's such extremists, if they're so dangerous, then why exactly are Democrats trying to get them elected in primaries over more moderate Republican possibilities?
	But he is like, I don't know.
	Part of the Democratic case here, you hear it from senior Democratic leaders, Nancy Pelosi among them, is that some of these Republican candidates, and Trump himself, are a threat to democracy.
	How can Democrats say that, but then back some of those election deniers in their own races?
	Yeah, look, it's going to be up to candidates across the board to pose those questions for Republican candidates to answer.
	Do you believe climate change is real or not?
	Do you believe a woman should be able to make the decisions on her own body or not?
	Be public, be on the record, and let the voters decide.
	Okay, but that's not an answer to the question, which is, why exactly are you guys attempting to fund the people who you then decry as extreme?
	It also explains why, of course, the media are paying so much attention to the January 6th narrative, because it all ties into broader democratic narratives.
	This has been true for as long as I've been covering politics, is that Democrats craft a narrative that seems wildly off-topic, and the entire media just jumped to.
	This is not new.
	This is not new in this era.
	I'm old enough to remember when George Stephanopoulos asked Mitt Romney about outlawing contraception in 2012.
	When they had nothing to do with anything.
	And suddenly, full-blown, we got a war on women narrative that actually was a major factor in the 2012 campaign.
	Well now, Democrats are like, Republicans are extreme!
	And the entire media tried to hop to and figure out how to paint Republicans as extreme.
	That means lots of coverage of January 6th.
	Merrick Garland over at DOJ, who, by the way, is a political hack.
	There was all this talk, while Bill Barr was AG, that he was a political hack on behalf of Trump.
	Meanwhile, he was denying Trump with regard to election fraud.
	Meanwhile, he was trying to curb Trump's worst impulses.
	But Merrick Garland is not trying to curb the worst impulses of anybody.
	He's out there investigating parents at school board meetings.
	He's out there investigating police departments for quote-unquote systemic racism without real evidence of it.
	And now he's out there sort of proclaiming that he's investigating President Trump.
	So here was Merrick Garland saying that the January 6th hearings are uncovering things the DOJ criminal probe didn't know, which raises the question of what he thinks he does for a living.
	You guys actually have criminal investigative power.
	If you're that all fired excited about what January 6th committee is doing, why didn't you do it in the first place, sir?
	Is the committee offering you anything in terms of an informal roadmap?
	Are you learning things you didn't know?
	The Justice Department has been doing...
	The most wide-ranging investigation in its history, and the committee is doing an enormously wide-ranging investigation as well.
	It is inevitable that there will be things that they find before we have found them, and it is inevitable that there will be things we find that they haven't found.
	The Justice Department Has from the beginning been moving urgently to learn everything we can about this period and to bring to justice everybody who's criminally responsible for interfering with the peaceful transfer of power.
	If we just talk about it over and over and over, probably people will think that the Republicans are extremists.
	And contributing to that narrative, of course, is Kamala Harris, but she does the worst job of it.
	We're going to have to start a series here, The Ongoing Adventures of Kamala Harris.
	She's basically the Amelia Bedeli of politics.
	Somebody says to Kamala Harris, draw the curtains, and she takes out a sketch pad and she starts drawing.
	That's what she is.
	Every single thing that Kamala Harris does is awkward.
	And as the human predictive text mechanism that has been misfiring, the algorithm is really bad.
	We bring you today's episode of The Adventures of Kamala Harris, in which she talks about the impact of Dobbs and how Republicans are extreme.
	She says the word impact a lot in this particular clip.
	The act of the United States Supreme Court To take away a constitutional right that had been recognized from the people of America will impact a lot of people and differently in some situations.
	And we need to be responsive to these issues and also lift up the voices of all people who will be impacted in the way that they will be impacted.
	So that's why we are convening today.
	And I will add a couple of points in terms of the direct impact that we anticipate there will be from the Dobbs decision.
	Well, that's a lot of impacting.
	Somebody needs a laxative because a lot of impacting is happening right there in that clip.
	That's a serious problem.
	Meanwhile, if you thought that Congress wasn't spending enough, they are bringing forth two policy bills.
	One is spending like $400 billion.
	The other is spending another $280 billion.
	Now, the $280 billion bill actually has some things in it that are useful.
	So according to the New York Times, the Senate on Wednesday passed an expansive $280 billion bill aimed at building up America's manufacturing and technological edge to counter China, right?
	We've been talking about this.
	We've been talking about the fact that China is building up its semiconductor capacity, so if it invades Taiwan and Taiwan fries all of its microchips, then suddenly China becomes essentially the world's leading supplier of manufactured microchips, even if they're more basic than the sophisticated stuff that was being produced in Taiwan.
	So the United States had better reshore a lot of its microchip capacity, because if it doesn't actually have access to those chips, America's in real trouble.
	So this has been something that the Trump administration was trying to do.
	Now the Senate has passed a bill to try to subsidize domestic manufacture of microchips.
	The legislation reflected a remarkable and rare consensus.
	In a polarized Congress in favor of forging a long-term strategy to address the nation's intensifying geopolitical rivalry with Beijing, the plan is centered around investing federal money into cutting-edge technologies and innovations to bolster the nation's industrial, technological, and military strength.
	The measure passed 64-33.
	17 Republicans voted in favor.
	Senator Chuck Schumer said no country's government, even a strong country like ours, can afford to sit on the sideline.
	I think that it's a sea change that will stay.
	The legislation will next be considered by the House, where it's expected to pass with some Republican support.
	The bill is a convergence of economic and national security policy.
	It would provide $52 billion in subsidies and additional tax credits to companies that manufacture chips in the United States.
	It also then adds on, and here is where you start to get into the boondoggle, $200 billion for scientific research, including into AI, robotics, quantum computing, and a variety of other technologies.
	Now, that's actually not the stuff that you need to subsidize because innovation happens in the United States.
	Innovation is market-driven in the United States.
	You actually don't need $200 billion for scientific research into, for example, AI, robotics, quantum computing.
	We're doing all that stuff here in the United States.
	We are way ahead of China in terms of our innovative capacity.
	China's way ahead of us in their manufacturing capacity.
	So subsidizing manufacturing plants here in the United States for the microchips, that's actually not a bad policy.
	If it were just a $50 billion bill, then I think it would have a lot more support.
	But somehow, always and forever, every $50 billion bill in Congress turns into a $300 billion bill.
	The bill calls for pouring $10 billion into the Department of Commerce, which would also dole out the chip subsidies to companies that apply to create 20 regional technology hubs across the country.
	The brainchild of Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, and Mr. Schumer, the hubs would aim to link together research universities with private industry in an effort to create Silicon Valley-like centers for technology innovation in areas hollowed out by globalization.
	So this is also a sort of...
	It's sort of a subsidy to the Rust Belt.
	The idea here is sort of promoted by people like Matthew Iglesias for a long time, which is that go into dying towns like Youngstown, Ohio and build like a high-tech center in Youngstown, Ohio with federal dollars.
	Now, on a basic subsidy level, If you're creating a manufacturing facility, make some sense.
	But if the idea is that we're going to, as a country, expend enormous quantities of money to move a bunch of people who live in Silicon Valley out to Youngstown, Ohio, for no reason other than we want to boost the economy of Youngstown, Ohio, I don't know why the American taxpayer should be subsidizing that.
	The legislation would steer billions to the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to promote both basic research and development into advanced semiconductor manufacturing as well as workforce development programs in an effort to build a labor pipeline for a slew of emerging industries.
	So a lot of this money is going to be wasted on, say, work retraining, which is generally useless.
	The way that people learn to do a job is they go to the job and then they do the job.
	One of the great lies about college is that you are qualified to do a job after college.
	I don't know a single person who works at my company who is qualified to do their job after college.
	They become qualified to do their job after spending several years doing their job.
	That's actually how people end up working here in the United States.
	But, here's the bottom line.
	There's some good news and there's some bad news.
	Again, the spending here is extraordinary.
	There's no reason it has to be this high.
	At least we're now taking the threat of China a little bit more seriously on a bipartisan basis.
	This is one of the few areas in American politics right now where there's actual bipartisan consideration and that's going to need to increase over time because China is in fact, if not an existential threat to the United States, a very serious threat to the geopolitics of the United States.
	And the Biden administration is very mixed in its messaging right now.
	On the one hand, the Biden White House is saying that they don't want Nancy Pelosi to go to Taiwan.
	And on the other hand, they're trying to build up manufacturing capacity in the United States.
	And Senator Chris Coons from Delaware, he's saying that Pelosi should not go to Taiwan because effectively we'd be getting out in front of our own capacity.
	Well, if that's the case, then we need to radically ramp up that capacity, don't we?
	Like, why are we attempting to not grow our Navy in real ways and treat China as the enemy that it is?
	Here's Senator Chris Coons from Delaware basically admitting that the United States is not ready for a conflict with China in any serious way.
	I think she needs to weigh the input that she gets from the administration, from the president, from our intelligence community.
	I do think it risks escalating tensions with China, but I also respect the ways that the Speaker over and over has highlighted human rights abuses within China and has stood up for the rights of people in the Indo-Pacific region broadly.
	Okay, so again, this administration is a little bit out over its skis, which is not a shock, but if we're going to play bipartisan catch-up, then at least something good is happening here.
	Bipartisan catch-up in terms of facing down China would be good.
	By the way, as a general measure of sort of societal fabric building, having an existential threat is not the worst thing in the world.
	The fact is that one of the key factors in the breakdown of the social fabric of the United States was the end of the Soviet Union.
	That is not lamenting the end of the Soviet Union, which is one of the most evil forces in the history of the planet.
	What it is saying is that when countries do not recognize that there are other players on the world stage, they tend to turn inward and start tearing each other's guts out.
	So if the United States were to recognize China as the global enemy that it is, then presumably that would require some sort of common mobilization by the American people.
	That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
	Alrighty, coming up, Chris Cuomo.
	He's back on TV, but the real thing is he's spilling the secrets from behind the scenes over at CNN.
	It's pretty interesting stuff.
	Well, you know what else is interesting?
	Excellent meat.
	You need a great steak.
	What you don't need is all the propaganda about meat.
	So you've heard grocery stores and left-wingers.
	Telling you it's time to buy the grass fed, super omega, morally superior, live your truth beef.
	Pushing those labels mean anything at all.
	Well, they don't mean anything.
	It just means that your beef was probably shipped somewhere from overseas.
	You know, it's already dead.
	And then it was shipped overseas.
	So probably it's been in the cargo hold for a little while.
	But what you need is the fresh American meat.
	Good Ranchers has it.
	Good Ranchers, only sources from farms and ranches here in the United States.
	Maybe you thought a steak cooking over a fire could not get more American.
	It can, with any box of Good Ranchers.
	And I can testify to the quality of their steaks, because they actually did the hard work.
	They got me a kosher steak.
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	GoodRanchers.com slash Ben Today.
	Fight the store-bought meat with me.
	Head on over to GoodRanchers.com slash Ben Today.
	Alrighty, this weekend is a brand new episode of my Sunday special.
	It features a very special guest, philosopher and scholar Yoram Hazony.
	He's one of the most interesting philosophers on the scene today.
	He's really leading the resurgence of what is called national conservatism, but he's not, I would say, as cut and dry as a lot of people would like to make him out to be.
	He has a lot of fascinating ideas about what conservatism is, what liberalism is.
	I agree with a lot of what he has to say.
	We disagree on some pretty significant issues.
	It's a fascinating conversation.
	Here's a little bit of what it sounds like.
	An actual human family is built of multiple generations, and those generations pass down constraints.
	Everybody pressures everybody else.
	And it's good that people pressure other people, because if you don't have those pressures, then you don't get the benefit of the wisdom of older people who have more experience, which you get from the pressures.
	To be free, but within limits, within limits that can help you.
	You should check out the episode.
	You should check out all of his work.
	You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Daily Wire, or wherever you get your podcasts.
	you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	♪♪ Meanwhile, it turns out that Chris Cuomo is back.
	Remember that time that he was fired from CNN, supposedly because he was coordinating with his brother?
	You know, with the approval of all the higher-ups at CNN?
	Well, now he's headed back to NewsNation, which I didn't even know was a thing that existed, but apparently it does.
	According to the Washington Post, Cuomo's new hour-long show will air in prime time.
	As did his CNN show, which ran every weekday from 2018 until last winter, when he exited the network amid an ethics controversy.
	Cuomo Primetime was the top-rated program on CNN in both 2019 and 2020, which means it had seven viewers as opposed to the normal six.
	Its former star will be moving to a network that is still trying to build an audience that can compete with the standard bearers in the cable news industry.
	While Cuomo's CNN show averaged 2 million nightly viewers in 2020, his last full year on the network, NewsNation, reportedly averaged only 46,000 viewers in Primetime last year.
	NewsNation was launched in September 2020 by Nexstar Media Group, which owns and operates local TV stations across the country.
	Apparently, other anchors are going to include Dan Abrams, a friend of Cuomo, former CNN anchor Ashley Banfield, former Fox News journalist Leland Vittert, and former ABC News journalist Adrienne Bankert.
	Cuomo's downfall at CNN was swift and abrupt.
	What's fun about this is basically that Chris Cuomo is now openly talking about how corrupt things were at CNN.
	So that's the fun part of this particular story.
	Not that Chris Cuomo is coming back on a network that nobody's ever heard of.
	So Chris Cuomo, he's now saying that the CNN brass knew full well that he was advising his brother on sexual harassment allegations and COVID while he was covering his brother for the news.
	Now, we all knew this, but now Chris Cuomo is saying it out loud.
	When your brother gets in trouble, you start advising him, talking to him, being involved with the meetings, etc.
	What did you tell CNN about your involvement in those conversations?
	Did you say to them right at the outset, hey guys, I just want you to know I'm going to be talking to my brother a lot through this process?
	It was known.
	It was known.
	So again, they had him on air while he was advising his brother and they all knew that that was the case over at CNN, which is just another reason why you should not actually trust your mainstream media outlets.
	Another reason is because they say slanderous things apparently on a regular basis and only occasionally are called to account.
	The most fun story of the day in the media, of course, is that Is that Turning Point USA, led by Charlie Kirk, sent a cease and desist to The View and obtained essentially an on-air apology.
	That is because Joy Behar went on The View.
	One of the least intelligent people in American politics, Joy Behar went on The View, which is a repository of nearly all human stupidity in one room.
	And compared TPUSA to Neo-Nazis based on the fact that a bunch of Neo-Nazis stood outside the TPUSA convention and trolled TPUSA, which they do at nearly every event.
	The white nationalists like to show up at TPUSA and they like to harass people outside TPUSA.
	I mean, this literally happened to me.
	I spoke at a TPUSA event, maybe three years ago, and white supremacists stood outside and harassed me and my family as I was walking with my children.
	That wasn't because of TPUSA, which had invited me to speak.
	So not quite the same thing.
	Here was Joy Behar being her usual idiotic self.
	There was a, what do you call it, this turning point conference with all the smoke?
	What are they, smoking something down there?
	Or it's like, whatever.
	Anyway...
	The Nazis were out there in front of the conference with anti-Semitic slurs.
	And the Nazi swastika, and a picture of a so-called Jewish person with exaggerated features, just like Goebbels did during the Third Reich.
	It's the same thing, right out of that same playbook.
	And DeSantis did not say anything about it.
	Nothing.
	So it's his sort of his rendition of a good people on both sides.
	No, it 100% is not like fan of the neo-Nazis.
	No, no.
	I've spoken at campaign events for Governor DeSantis because it's my home state.
	No.
	Governor DeSantis routinely bragged about how the state of Florida is the number one incoming state for Orthodox Jews.
	He's one of the most philo-semitic people I've ever met in my entire life.
	It's an absurdity pile on top of absurdity.
	And then members of The View went on to essentially label TPUSA a neo-Nazi convention.
	Well, this prompted the TPUSA founders to send a cease and desist to the hosts of The View.
	And that forced The View to basically go ahead and apologize.
	By the way, my favorite thing is that Whoopi Goldberg actually said on The View, quote, you let them in.
	You knew what they were.
	And that is not true.
	I mean, they were outside protesters.
	TPUSA did not let them in.
	And then Goldberg said, my point was metaphorical.
	No, your point was not.
	First of all, Whoopi, stop saying things about Nazis.
	Just stop it.
	Again, Whoopi Goldberg is the person... I'm never going to get over the fact that this person is on air.
	Still, after saying on national TV that Hitler was not a racist because the Jews were white.
	I'm never going to get over that.
	That is such an unbelievably anti-Semitic statement.
	Because the idea is, of course, that if you are Jewish, then you are a member of the sort of white majority.
	And therefore, if you are targeted by white supremacists, that's a white-on-white attack.
	You're not part of the intersectional coalition.
	It's just amazing.
	She got away with that.
	So, her spouting off about who lets the Nazis in, like, last I checked, TPUSA wasn't defending Hitler as a non-racist.
	Whoopie.
	Whoopie said this sort of thing.
	And a cease and desist was sent.
	Apparently, according to the lawyers for TPUSA, they said, the view hosts intentionally and falsely associated TPUSA with neo-Nazi protesters outside the event, placing TPUSA in denigrating and false light and negatively impacting its public perception.
	Such action will not be tolerated.
	Specifically, the view hosts insidiously and cavalierly stated TPUSA let neo-Nazis in to its SIS event, metaphorically embraced them And that neo-Nazis were in the mix of people.
	The assertion that TPUSA is complicit or affiliated in any way with neo-Nazi protesters outside the event is outlandish, false, defamatory, and disgraceful.
	And that's, of course, true.
	And that prompted not Whoopi, not Joy, but Sarah Haines to have to issue an apology on their behalf on The View yesterday.
	So here it was.
	So on Monday, we talked about the fact that there were openly neo-Nazi demonstrators outside the Florida Student Action Summit of the Turning Point USA group.
	We want to make clear that these demonstrators were gathered outside the event and that they were not invited or endorsed by Turning Point USA.
	A Turning Point USA spokesman said the group, quote, 100% condemns those ideologies.
	and said Turning Point USA security tried to remove the neo-Nazis from the area but could not because they were on public property. Also, Turning Point USA wanted to clarify, wanted us to clarify that this was a Turning Point USA summit and not a Republican Party event. So we apologize for anything we said that may have been unclear on these points.
	They still invited Matt Gaetz though, I would just like to know.
	These are the people that you should trust in the media.
	You should also trust people like Yamiche Alcindor, who again is still a White House correspondent for, I believe, PBS.
	So she gets some taxpayer dollars.
	Who says that it is transphobic to say that men are competing in women's sports if men are competing in women's sports.
	Here is Yamiche Alcindor again promoting false information.
	Cultural issues were very popular in that room.
	He, former President Trump, went on a long rant about transgender Americans and he used transphobic language.
	In particular, he was talking about transgender women competing in sports and said that they were men trying to compete against women, which of course is not the right way to talk about that issue.
	Actually, that's exactly the right way to talk about that issue.
	Anyway, it is amazing how the media have fully embraced all the lies the left tells about everything.
	From social policy, to medicine, to everything.
	We are now learning, according to Brandon Dre over at Daily Wire, puberty blockers, known as gonadotropin-releasing hormone substances, received a warning from the FDA officials earlier this month, saying the drug could cause brain swelling, loss of vision, and serious risks for children injecting the hormone.
	Officials said a plausible association between using puberty blockers and pseudotumor cerebri, which displays symptoms similar to a brain tumor, was identified in six young girls between the ages of 5 and 12.
	Five were undergoing treatment for central precocious puberty, one for transgender care.
	FDA officials report transgender care.
	The onset of pseudotumor cerebri symptoms ranged from 3 to 240 days after the agonist initiation.
	Symptoms included visual disturbances, headaches, and vomiting.
	Other effects agonist cause were an increase in blood pressure, brain swelling, and abducens at neuropathy.
	A spokesperson for the FDA told Formulary Watch the cases were considered clinically serious and determined that a warning should be added to all GnRH agonist products approved for pediatric patients.
	But you've been told it's all reversible, it's totally fine, there's no problem with all this, and the media continue to repeat those lies.
	In fact, if you point out that boys and girls are different and that injecting kids full of hormones is a very, very bad idea, then they will ban you from social media.
	They'll throw you off of YouTube if you say these sorts of things clearly and concisely.
	They'll ban Jordan Peterson from Twitter.
	He's still banned from Twitter for mentioning that men cannot be women and women cannot be men.
	So why do people not trust the media?
	Well, this would be the reason that people do not trust the media.
	Alrighty, we have reached the end of today's show.
	One last note.
	Tune in tonight to catch an all-new episode of Daily Wire backstage.
	Your favorite Daily Wire hosts come together to discuss the news of the day.
	Join me, Michael Knolls, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klaven, Godking, Jeremy Boring, 7 p.m.
	Eastern on the Daily Wire's YouTube channel or at dailywireplus.com.
	We will see you there.
	Also, we'll be coming back here later today with additional content.
	Coming up soon is the Matt Wall Show that airs 1.30 p.m.
	Eastern.
	Be sure to check it out over at dailywireplus.com.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	On the Matt Wall Show, we talk about the things that matter.
	Real issues that affect you, your family, our country, not just politics, but culture, faith, current events, all the fundamentals.

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