All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 3, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:05
Are The Republicans Going To Blow 2022? | Ep. 1548
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Republicans could lose the Senate despite getting serious electoral ground across the country.
Rifts reportedly break out between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Joe Biden, and Democrats declare monkeypox a public health emergency.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Today's show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Do you like your web history being seen and sold to advertisers?
No?
Me neither.
Get ExpressVPN right now at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
First, you're paying too much for everything.
You're seeing the prices increase on pretty much all the things.
But there is one thing you don't need to be worried about with regard to spending more money, and that is your phone bill.
Because right now, you're probably spending too much money already with one of the big guys.
Why not switch on over to Pure Talk?
Pure Talk will give you talk, text, and plenty of data for just $30 a month.
No price increase there.
I'm a Pure Talk customer.
They are incredibly reliable.
I travel a lot for my job.
The 5G coverage is just great.
Plus, they make the switch from your current provider incredibly easy.
It won't take you more than 10 minutes.
It's well worth the savings.
Right now, Pure Talk is offering their best discount ever to my listeners.
One month for free.
I've been endorsing Pure Talk for a couple of years here.
They have never made an offer like that.
Lock in talk, text, and data on America's most reliable 5G network.
They shared hours with one of the big guys.
For just $30 a month plus, get one month free when you make the switch today.
Just go to puretalk.com, enter code SHAPIRO for this special offer.
That's puretalk.com.
Enter code SHAPIRO to get started.
That's puretalk.com.
Use promo code SHAPIRO and you can get one month for free, which is a fantastic offer.
Lower your phone bill because why would you want to spend more when you could spend less?
Puretalk.com.
Alrighty, so we have a bunch of results from Republican primaries across the country, and what they are showing is sort of a mixed record of candidate selection from Republicans.
This has not been a sort of major surprise, given the fact that Republicans very often nominate candidates in what are supposed to be wave years, who are kind of sketch.
You remember this in 2010, there were a bunch of Republican candidates in what should have been Lean are races who seemed out of the box and then ended up losing very winnable races.
Republicans have an unfortunate tendency in primaries to select the people who they think are the most passionate, the most potentially game-changing, and then those people would go on to lose the general election.
Famously, William F. Buckley suggested that the art of politics when it comes to primary voting is to select the rightmost candidate who can win.
And very often Republican voters forget that last part of the sentence, who can win, and they just select the rightmost candidate.
An understandable mistake.
This is complicated by cross currents from President Trump, because so much of American politics has now become a litmus test on loyalty.
And so when President Trump attacks a candidate, very often people resonate to the candidate that Trump endorses, even if the candidate that Trump endorses isn't exactly a person who is likely to win a general election, simply because they feel the person that Trump is ripping on is not sufficiently loyal to the cause.
There are all these varying sort of eddies in American politics.
And what this is amounting to is Republicans blowing the chance, perhaps, to actually win back the Senate or win a broader majority in the House of Representatives.
Yesterday, Nate Silver's 538 switched its projection to forecast for the first time that Democrats will actually keep the United States Senate.
That is a direct result of candidate selection by Republicans in primaries ranging from places like Georgia to places like Pennsylvania.
Nate Silver wrote on Twitter, it seems clear there's something happening here and movement toward Democrats in recent polls isn't just statistical noise.
He says that something is probably in part or indeed mostly Dobbs, meaning the Supreme Court decision to overrule Roe versus Wade.
But there are quite a few factors that have come to look better for Democrats over the past few weeks, including their legislative agenda.
Silver's forecasts are based on the deluxe version of his model, which simulates the election 40,000 times to see who wins most often.
This sample of 100 outcomes gives you an idea of the range of scenarios the model considers possible, according to Mediaite.
In that model, Democrats now win the U.S.
Senate majority 56 out of 100 times.
The GOP wins the remaining 44 out of 100 times.
Now, the reality is that it's possible to overread the political trend lines to sort of green-light Democratic proposals in a way that is inaccurate.
The reason that Republicans are on the brink right now is because, again, they've selected a bunch of extraordinarily weak candidates for the general election.
Right now, Mehmet Oz is losing to John Fetterman, a person who has openly suggested restricting fracking in a heavy natural gas-producing state, a person who Basically could not be on the campaign trail for a couple of months here because he had a stroke.
A person who has taken radical positions on nearly every topic up to and including men participating in women's sports.
Oz is losing to Federman specifically because Oz is widely considered in Pennsylvania to be sort of a carpetbagger.
Meanwhile, down in Georgia, Herschel Walker, who is a popular figure because of his football past but has no political experience, makes gaffes fairly frequently on the campaign trail.
And unfortunately, in the middle of the campaign had a bunch of children that nobody knew about, sort of crop up.
That is a weak candidacy.
So those are both winnable races that Republicans right now are in a position to lose.
If you look at the situation in Ohio, J.D.
Vance should win that Senate seat, considering that Ohio has moved pretty solidly red.
The problem is that J.D.
Vance, running in his first elected campaign, he is not gathering enough money right now to fight against Tim Ryan, who's a very skilled campaigner from the Democratic side of the aisle in the House of Representatives.
There are a bunch of seats that Republicans really should win and that they are on the verge of losing.
And a lot of that has to do with candidate selection.
So this, it is possible to misread the sort of, where the buoy is on top of the waves for the tide.
And they very often say with regard to climate change, that weather is not the same as climate change, right?
Climate change is the broad change of the climate over the course of a hundred years.
Weather is what's happening outside right now.
It's very easy in politics to misread the weather for climate change.
So instead of looking at the fact that there's a rainstorm and that rainstorm is being caused by bad candidate selection on the right side of the aisle, it's easy instead to say, well, that must be because there's a significant climate change toward Democrats overall in the United States right now.
And that I'm not seeing a lot of evidence for.
Because the fact is that the long-term trends for the Republican Party seem good.
It's the short-term choices that seem pretty weak right now.
To take an example, MSNBC's Steve Kornacki, who's a data analyst, he is pointing out that Hispanics are now voting Democrat by a margin of about 13 points.
That is down from 38 points.
Here was Kornacki last night.
One of the major stories to emerge from the 2020 election was the shift we saw in the Hispanic vote.
Democrats still won the Hispanic vote in 2020, you can see, by 21 points.
But that was down 17 points from 2016.
Hillary Clinton won the Hispanic vote by 38, Joe Biden by just 21.
And you know what?
The trend seems to be continuing in 2022.
What you're looking at here, this is the average of every poll we've got out there that's been taken over the last three months that looks at the Hispanic vote.
And you put them all together, Hispanics are now voting Democratic by just 13 points.
So from 38 to 21, now down in the 2022 midterm polling to a Democratic advantage of just 13 points.
Okay, that is very bad news long-term for the Democrats who have relied very heavily on the Hispanic vote, breaking extraordinarily largely in their favor in, for example, senatorial, gubernatorial, and presidential elections.
So the long-term trend lines with regard to Republican politics here are actually really, really good.
But you know what?
There's still a lot of people who are losing sleep over these upcoming elections.
Well, there's no reason to lose sleep because your sheets are bad.
You instead need bull and branch sheets.
So you've heard all about thread count, right?
Oh, a thousand thread count!
The thread count doesn't matter.
It matters what quality material is being used.
A tarp can be a thousand thread count.
Depends on what kind of threads you're using, obviously.
Bolin Branch uses the best 100% organic cotton threads on earth for superior softness and better nights sleep.
Their sheets are buttery, breathable, impossibly soft.
They only get better with every single wash. They're so good actually that in my home we took all of the other sheets in our house and literally threw them away because that's how good Bull & Branch is. Plus, they have the signature hemmed sheets. They're a bestseller for a reason. These are the highest quality threads and they fit your mattress the way they are supposed to. One of the things that bothers me is when you put the fitted sheet on the mattress and then in the middle of the night you find your face directly on the mattress.
That's not going to happen with Bull and Branch.
Their sheets fit the deepest of mattresses.
They're labeled with top and bottom tags, so making your bed is easier than ever.
Best of all, Bull and Branch gives you a 30-night risk-free trial with free shipping and returns on all of your orders.
Get 15% off your first set of sheets when you use promo code SHAPIRO at bullandbranch.com.
Again, that's bullandbranch, B-O-L-L, and branch.com, promo code SHAPIRO.
Meanwhile, in formerly battleground states like Florida, you're starting to see significant movement away from the Democratic Party.
If you look at, for example, the Miami-Dade voter registration numbers, what you are seeing is bad news for the Democrats.
Between July 1st and August 1st of this year, for example, in Miami-Dade County, total registration Republicans picked up something like 3,200 votes.
Democrats picked up 124 votes in that same period.
So you're seeing Republican voter registration outpacing Democratic voter registration in terms of gains in very significant ways in Miami-Dade, which is a very Democratic county in Florida.
If you start to see those margins coming down in places like Miami-Dade, then basically you can take Florida off the board as a potential purple or blue state for Democrats.
And in fact, Amy Walter, again over at FiveThirtyEight, she's pointing out that if you look at the Electoral College right now, The Electoral College increasingly is favoring Republicans, because a lot of the states that have a lot of electoral votes are moving from purple to red.
And so, theoretically, you could have a Republican candidate lose by three percentage points in the popular vote, and the Democrats still win only about 218 electoral votes.
So there's some long-term trends for the Republican Party that are very good here.
One of the other long-term trends here is that you're starting to see the Republican Party come back together around candidates who are well-known by their constituencies.
So, for example, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has an entire piece today dedicated to the proposition that the GOP civil war in Georgia is basically over.
Remember, there's a massive civil war in Georgia over Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, and this was largely based on the fact that Donald Trump was very ticked off over the fact that Georgia certified the election on behalf of Joe Biden because, frankly, there was no evidence of voter fraud sufficient to overturn the electoral results in Georgia, despite all of the fulminating by President Trump, who never actually provided the evidence in court or anywhere else.
that Georgia had had gamed the election in a way that was provable in any way.
Now the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is saying that Governor Brian Kemp's biggest political challenge might have hinged on whether he could win over the fractious Republican base amid an onslaught of insults from former President Donald Trump.
Now the bigger question might be whether he'll earn more votes from Republicans than any other candidate on the ballot.
Meaning Brian Kemp is pretty popular in the state of Georgia.
He overcame David Perdue by a margin of 71 to 29.
That was Donald Trump's preferred candidate.
And what this again suggests that when Republicans make decisions with their head instead of sort of the knee-jerk reactionary What do I think of a candidate I've never heard of based on something that President Trump says?
Because I know the media hates Trump, so if Trump likes somebody, that must mean that the person is good.
Or if Trump attacks somebody, that means that the person is bad.
When voters actually know the candidate that you're talking about, very often, that candidate does better than would be suggested by Trump endorsing or not endorsing in a race.
So last night, for example, you had a bunch of mixed results in primaries around the country.
I mean, really, really mixed results in primaries around the country.
And the point I want to make here is that when you talk about whether Republicans lose the 2022 cycle or they don't perform as well as they should or whether they underperform, a lot of that is going to be misread by the media as reflecting broader trends in American politics that simply are not there.
So, for example, last night in Missouri, Eric Reitens, who had run an extraordinary Trumpy campaign, he had cut an ad in which he literally said he was rhino hunting while carrying around a shotgun, pretending he was breaking into the home with SWAT officers of one of his political opponents.
Eric Reitens went down to flaming defeat in that primary.
He finished like a distant third in that primary to Eric Schmidt, who ended up winning that primary and will probably go on to win The Senate seat in Missouri without Republicans having to expend tens of millions of dollars to hold that Senate seat.
So that's some good news.
So Trump had sort of backed Eric Greitens.
Greitens went down a flaming defeat.
On the other hand, in Arizona, Carrie Lake looks like she is going to pull out a very narrow victory over Karen Robson.
Robson was endorsed by Mike Pence.
Carrie Lake was endorsed by Trump.
This was very heavily focused on by Trump.
Again, I think one of the problems here is that nobody actually knew the person that Carrie Lake was running against on a broad national level.
This is not a particularly famous person.
And so when Trump is able to intervene in close races, he's still able to tip the balance.
But the notion that Trump has sort of overweening power to simply endorse And that person inevitably wins?
I don't think that that's correct.
It's more of a mixed bag here for Republicans in terms of how they pick their candidates.
The rule of Trump when it comes to Trump's engagement in these primary races is if he engages in a race in which either the candidate who's being attacked is perceived as insufficiently loyal to the Republican Party or where no one knows the candidates, he has outsized weight.
In races where people know the candidates and are not perceived as being loyal to the Democratic Party or as lackeys for the media, then Trump doesn't have nearly as much weight, which may hold some lessons for 2024.
If Donald Trump attacks somebody who's widely liked by the Republican base, those attacks may not have the same effect as they would on a candidate who is a relative unknown, for example.
Where Trump did have an effect is in potentially losing some seats that were quite winnable, right?
For example, there is a race that was happening in Michigan, the third district, and that race was between Peter Mayer, who voted in favor of impeaching Trump, and a guy named John Gibbs, who's a Trump-endorsed challenger.
And Trump had put Outside focus on this race because he hates anybody who voted in favor of his impeachment.
Now understand that this district is a Biden plus a district is a heavy Biden district.
Mayor was holding that district as a quote unquote moderate Republican who had voted in favor of impeachment.
John Gibbs won that race, but the reason that he won that race is not just because Trump endorsed in that race.
It's because the Democrats literally spent millions of dollars promoting John Gibbs.
By suggesting in ads that he was, quote-unquote, too extreme for the state, which was a way of getting Republicans to go out and vote for him.
In fact, Peter Mayer wrote an entire piece over at commonsense.news talking about this.
this.
He said, Tomorrow I'm facing off against John Gibbs in the Republican primary for Michigan's third congressional district.
The race is closed.
Internal polling has us within single digits of one another, but Gibbs and I couldn't be more different.
I'm a staunch defender of the Constitution and the rule of law.
Accordingly, I became the first incoming freshman to recognize former VP Biden's presidential Then, three days after I was sworn into office in January 2021, I was in the House chamber when rioters overran the Capitol.
A week later, I joined nine other Republicans, including Liz Cheney, to impeach then-President Trump with a heavy but resolute conscience.
I'm the only freshman in history to impeach a president of his own party.
Gibbs, a former political appointee in the Trump administration, denies the results of the 2020 presidential election.
He's accused Obama officials of taking part in bizarre satanic rituals.
He has defended anti-Semites on his now-locked Twitter account and has tweeted that Democrats are the party of Islam, gender-bending, anti-police, you racist.
Since the election of Donald Trump, Democrats have claimed democracy is under grave threat.
So why exactly are they funding Gibbs?
They launched a $435,000 ad buy to promote Gibbs in the final days leading up to the primary.
So Democrats are injecting themselves in these races to try and boost candidates who they think are going to lose on the Republican side of the aisle.
And some Republicans, predictably enough, are going along with it based on their sense that if, for example, you voted in favor of impeachment, this means that they would rather lose the seat, presumably, than allow you to continue to sit in the seat, right?
This is not a Liz Cheney situation where Liz Cheney is going to go down to flaming defeat in her primary and she's probably going to lose to another Republican who's going to go on to represent that district.
You're talking here about a swing district in which a Republican holds a Biden district.
That seat is likely to go for the Democrats at this point.
It's very easy, as I say, to misread the sort of trend lines by focusing in on these individual controversial political points.
The trend lines are still in favor of Republicans in the mid to long term.
But Republicans can indeed blow short term elections through making mistakes.
So it's easy to look at the Gibbs story and think, OK, well, Republicans, they They're facing a bunch of headwinds.
Well, no, maybe they're just not picking great candidates, and that's sort of a problem.
And that's why Democrats are promoting those candidates.
There's more on that in a second.
First, some states now have laws that say that as early as the 2030 model year, new vehicles are going to have to be electric in order to be registered.
Cars with internal combustion engines will only be able to get license plates if they were built before the end of the 2020s.
People are going to keep repairing and driving those old cars for generations right now, which means you better maintain the car that you've got.
In fact, your used car right now might be worth more than a new car straight off the lot.
You need to preserve that asset by heading on over to RockAuto.com.
They've been in the auto parts business for 20 years.
Family-owned, their goal is to make auto parts available and affordable to keep you safe on the road.
RockAuto.com's online parts catalog is incredibly easy to use.
You can search all the parts available for your specific car, SUV, or truck with photos, specs, and installation tips.
Not only will they have the part you need, they'll usually give you several trusted brands to choose from.
RockAuto's kits are also popular because they bundle together all the parts you need for a successful repair.
You don't get halfway through installing a timing belt, only to discover you actually need another pulley.
Professional mechanics, do-it-yourselfers, they always pay the same at reliably low prices.
Go to rockauto.com, get brakes, shocks, carpet, wipers, headlights, mirrors, mufflers, lug nuts, or any other part you need, rockauto.com.
And be sure to write Shapiro in there, how did you hear about us box?
So they know that I sent you.
I'll give you an example of misreading the long-term trend.
You can see the media is going to do this a lot today.
So the media are very into the story from Kansas.
So there was an amendment that was put on the ballot In Kansas, that essentially would have amended the constitution of the state of Kansas to get rid of the codification Roe versus Wade in the state of Kansas, right?
In the state of Kansas, the quote-unquote right to abortion is protected by the state constitution.
This amendment would have gotten rid of that in the state constitution and then it would have moved that back to the legislature.
So the yes vote would have essentially removed this from the purview of the of the courts and moved it back into the realm of the legislature.
Now, I will say that the way that this thing was phrased on the ballot is extremely confusing.
It is not a particularly clear amendment.
And the way that you write these amendments, everyone knows this, right, left, and center, when you write referenda for the ballot, the way that those referenda are written has a major impact on how people actually vote.
But you can't overcome the simple fact that in this particular election, 60% of people of Kansas said they did not want this thing removed from the Constitution and moved back into the realm of the legislature.
So this, of course, led Democrats and members of the media, but I repeat myself, To suggest that this is going to lead to a broad wave of Democratic elections across the board.
That this just demonstrates the ire against the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.
This is going to drive Democrats to the polls.
It's going to get them all excited.
That is not what this election is.
You have to dramatically misread the data to come up with that particular conclusion.
The reason you have to misread that data is because if you look at the actual voter turnout in Kansas, which was up pretty much across the board, what you see is that Republican voter turnout, because it was a primary day, was way higher than Democratic voter turnout.
In the Republican primary, for example, for governor, what you see is that approximately 264,000 Democrats showed up to vote in the Democratic primary.
A whopping 420,000 Republicans showed up to vote in the Republican primary, which is not a close primary.
Which means 420,000 compared to 264-265,000.
You're talking about, like, easily 30% more Republicans showed up to vote.
20-30% more Republicans showed up to vote than Democrats, and yet the attempt to decodify Roe in the Kansas state constitution went down to flaming defeat by a margin of about 60-40.
And even in areas that Trump won, Many Republicans voted in favor of retaining the quote-unquote right to abortion in the Kansas state constitution.
So there are some Kansas counties that Trump won.
For example, Leavenworth County.
Trump won that county by 21 percent.
61 to 39 people voted in favor of keeping the amendment in the state constitution that codifies Roe.
So in other words, what this actually shows, so Democrats are going to say what this shows is tremendous upsurge in anger over Roe v. Wade.
That is not what this shows.
What this shows is that people are congenitally predisposed to maintaining the status quo in nearly every area of life, particularly controversial social issues.
It also shows, you know, people are saying this is going to be transferable, this sort of passion is going to be transferable to federal levels.
I don't see how that happens.
People are saying, well, this just demonstrates that Roe never should have been overturned.
Weird, because it seems like this is a state vote to do what the state wants to do.
So actually, it undercuts the idea that this is going to be a national election issue for Democrats, because it'll get sent back to the states, which is what happens when you overturn Roe, and then the states are going to get to decide.
So Kansas is going to have very different laws than, say, Oklahoma.
And that's sort of what the court suggested.
So it's possible to overread these trends and you're going to see a lot of political commentators overread these trends in an attempt to prop up the Democratic Party long term.
They can do this.
I don't think it's going to work particularly well for them.
This is why you're hearing all these narratives about revitalized Democratic strength on the ballot.
Democrats are going to surge here.
I don't think they're going to surge.
I think what you're going to see is basically what the polls say right now is where the polls are going to be all the way up through the election.
You're going to see some candidates on the Republican side lose because they shouldn't have been nominated.
You're going to see some Republicans who are kind of weak win because it's a bad year for Democrats.
But what you're going to see is the media trying to convince themselves desperately that Democrats have come up with a new formula for winning by looking at particular instances of weather and then misinterpreting that as political climate.
This is their pitch, after all.
This is why Pete Buttigieg is out there on national TV talking about how when we're getting infrastructures on, this is going to change our electoral fate.
Again, I think that that is whistling past the graveyard here for Democrats.
Here's Pete Buttigieg trying to do it.
Last week we announced a use of part of the money in order to make more transit stations accessible.
A couple weeks before that we put out the first wave of airport terminal grants.
We're improving 84 airport terminals around the country.
It's everything that we've wanted for a long time in American infrastructure after years and years, years and years of talk.
The last president talked a good game about this.
Now we're actually getting it done.
And the Washington Post is pushing the same notion, right?
The Washington Post is trying to push Senator Kyrsten Sinema, for example, to ram through this $433 billion environmental climate change boondoggle bill.
And they say that they need to do this because, after all, this will demonstrate that they can deliver on their promises.
The Washington Post editorial board says Ms.
Sinema shouldn't sink this bill, most of whose contents she has indicated in the past she supports.
She shouldn't sink it because she opposes closing the carried interest loophole.
That provision unambiguously aids those who need most at the expense only of those who need it, not at all.
But again, the Washington Post is under the belief that if Democrats do more democratic policy, this will make them more popular.
And I think that they are trying to string together a series of questionable data points to come to that particular conclusion.
So in other words, could Republicans blow 2022?
Sure.
Republicans can always blow things.
You can always count on the Republicans to miss every opportunity.
This is a thing that Republicans routinely do.
But if you are using this to try and chart trend lines on behalf of the Democratic Party, I think that you are going to be sadly mistaken.
Over the course of the next few years.
Because again, the Democratic Party has moved too far left for the mainstream of America right now.
And bad and arrogant Republican primary selections of people who are unlikely to win in the general because they get overconfident and so they nominate AOC candidates in Peter Mayer areas.
Doing kind of what Democrats have done in some areas where they nominate extreme candidates to fill moderate seats.
Again, bad candidate selection does not make up for the broad trend lines in American politics, which are cutting against the Democrats.
So don't misread the tea leaves if you're watching this thing and determine that Democrats are therefore likely to achieve parity.
Republicans, again, as I said before, Republicans can not regain the Senate.
They can regain the House by, say, 15 or 20 seats as opposed to 40 seats.
And all of that can be because of mistakes in how they pick their candidates.
The trend lines are still the trend lines.
So don't make the mistake of thinking that just because Republicans are selecting bad candidates, this spells doom for Republicans down the line.
Well, meanwhile, I gotta tell you, there are a lot of people who are stifling in this summer's heat.
Well, I am not, thanks to my Tommy John underwear.
You can play it cool with Tommy John.
Tommy John's breathable, lightweight fabric keeps you two to three times cooler and dries four to five times faster than regular cotton.
Their Apollo underwear will keep you up to seven degrees cooler than cotton.
It gives you four times the stretch of competing brands.
No pinching, bunching, riding up.
This is why Tommy John doesn't have customers, they have fanatics.
They have basically an anti-wedgie guarantee.
Let me tell you, that would have helped me a lot in high school.
With over 17 million pairs sold, people love their Tommy John underwear and loungewear.
Tommy John knows you're the most confident when you're the most comfortable.
Plus, there's no risk because you're covered with Tommy John's best pair you'll ever wear or it's free.
Guarantee.
Shop Tommy John slash Ben right now.
Get 20% off your very first order.
That's 20% off right now at TommyJohn.com slash Ben.
And these are the only underwear that grace this magnificent tuchus.
You should take the same advice.
Go to TommyJohn.com slash Ben right now.
You can see the site for details.
Again, the simple fact is Tommy John underwear are the best underwear on the market.
They're made of the best material.
They're the most durable.
You can throw them in the wash 1 million times.
They'll still come out great.
Tommy John is the best.
Go check them out right now.
They've got men's stuff.
They've got women's stuff, all sorts of great gear.
Tommyjohn.com slash Ben right now for 20% off your first order.
Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi has now arrived in Taiwan.
To her credit, Nancy Pelosi has always been very pro-Taiwan going back decades.
According to the Washington Post, Nancy Pelosi's adversarial relationship with China was thrust back into the spotlight on Tuesday as she touched down in Taiwan as part of a congressional trip through Asia.
Her visit to the self-governed island China claims as its own came in the face of threats from Beijing, as well as pushback within her own party.
Her visit is a significant signal of American foreign policy from the politician second in line to the presidency.
It's the first trip to Taiwan by a House speaker since Newt Gingrich did it in 1997.
Beijing has sent warnings of retaliation ahead of her visit.
Pelosi was undeterred.
She wrote in a Washington Post op-ed, in the face of the Chinese Communist Party's accelerating aggression, our congressional delegation's visit should be seen as an unequivocal statement that America stands with Taiwan, our democratic partner, as it defends itself and its freedom.
The trip marks the culmination of a 35-year career spent as an outspoken critic of China, even when domestic issues overshadowed her foreign policy work.
This week's trip to Taiwan marked a surprising bipartisan moment as Republicans joined congressional Democrats in encouraging Pelosi's travel, a notable about-face for a party that staunchly categorizes Democrats as weak on the communist country.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and 25 other GOP senators released a statement moments after Pelosi landed in Taiwan, lauding her defiance of China.
So again, on sort of an ideological level, there is No serious question that the Speaker of the House should be able to visit Taiwan, nor is there a serious question that Taiwan should be viewed as an independent country, that right now it is only the prospect of war with China that prevents Taiwan from being openly acknowledged as an independent country.
China, for its part, is ratcheting up its military drills.
So there's talk that they would shoot down Pelosi's plane.
That, of course, was never going to happen.
But according to Bloomberg, China will conduct large-scale military drills and missile tests around Taiwan in a defiant show of force after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi became the highest-ranking U.S.
politician to land on the island in a quarter century.
Beijing announced six exclusion zones encircling Taiwan to facilitate live-fire military drills from Thursday to Sunday.
with some of the areas crossing into the island's territorial waters. The size and scope of the areas could set the stage for China's most provocative actions near Taiwan in decades.
Separately, the PLA, the People's Liberation Army of China, said exercises could start as soon as Tuesday, leaving open the possibility of military activities around Taiwan while Pelosi was still on the island. The operations include long-range live firing in the Taiwan Strait and regular guided fire testing in the eastern waters off Taiwan from Tuesday evening, according to the PLA. Xi Yi, a spokesperson for the East So, two things can be true at once.
quote, this action is targeted at the U.S.'s shocking recent major escalation on the Taiwan issue and serves as a serious warning to Taiwanese independence forces or those who are seeking independence.
Meanwhile, the White House is trying to figure out exactly what Nancy Pelosi is even doing there.
So two things can be true at once.
One, it should not be verboten for the Speaker of the House to visit Taiwan.
Two, the Speaker of the House should have some sort of cognizable rationale for visiting Taiwan at this time if you are actually attempting to achieve something.
Like, every action should be an attempt to achieve a certain effect.
I'm not sure what this action is intended to achieve other than solidarity.
I'm in favor of the solidarity.
The question is whether the expression of solidarity was necessary in order to Yes, state where the United States is on Taiwan, or as I suggested yesterday, whether Pelosi has essentially set up the United States for a fall here by making pledges that the United States is not willing to actually fulfill, which is a habit, unfortunately, for the United States government under bipartisan administrations.
They make commitments to places and then they proceed to run away from those places when actual hard power is demonstrated by America's enemies.
And the most recent example of this, of course, is Afghanistan, which we'll get to in just a minute.
According To the Washington Post, the White House worked urgently to de-escalate tensions with China, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met Wednesday with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and other officials during a high-profile visit to the self-governing island against the administration's wishes, hoping to head off a geopolitical crisis amid threats and military maneuvers by Beijing.
White House officials warned that China is preparing itself for possible aggressive actions in response to Pelosi's visit beyond this week.
They reiterated forcefully that the Chinese Communist Party should not use the visit as a pretext To increase military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait.
But of course, that's exactly what China is going to do.
White House spokesman John Kirby, who is the National Security Council spokesperson, he said, we've seen a number of announcements from the PRC in just the last several hours that are unfortunately right in line with what we had anticipated.
China has positioned itself to take further steps. We expect it will continue to react over a longer term horizon. Pelosi said, quote, we will not abandon our commitments to Taiwan.
We are proud of our enduring friendship.
Tsai presented Pelosi with a medal, the Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon for her work promoting US-Taiwan ties.
Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security advisor, spoke with his Chinese counterpart to defend Pelosi's right to visit, but even so did not think the trip was a good idea, according to the White House.
Sullivan expressed concerns about Pelosi's trip to multiple administration officials and asked for suggestions on how to dissuade her from traveling to Taiwan.
And now the White House's perspective on all of this?
is reflected in a piece by Thomas Friedman, the egregiously bad columnist for the New York Times.
But Friedman is basically a lackey for the Biden administration.
You remember that he recently wrote a piece in which he went to the White House and he sat down with Joe Biden and he talked about how Joe Biden and he were basically best friends.
So what that means is that Thomas Friedman, the foreign policy columnist for the New York Times, who can be bought for a cheap meal at a third-rate hotel in a third-world country.
That really is how Thomas Friedman writes his columns.
He goes to a third-world country You get him a cheap meal and then he talks about the wonders of your country.
It's a cheap date.
But his column today is a rather fascinating window into what must be the thinking over at the White House.
And it has some sort of buried leads about the relationship between what's going on in Ukraine and what's currently going on with regard to Taiwan and China.
He has a piece today called Why Pelosi's Visit to Taiwan is Utterly Reckless.
And here's what he says.
He says, quote, I have a lot of respect for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but if she does go ahead with the visit to Taiwan this week against President Biden's wishes, she'll be doing something that is utterly reckless, dangerous, dangerous and irresponsible, which is very strong language.
Nothing good will come of it.
Taiwan will not be more secure or more prosperous as a result of this purely symbolic visit.
And a lot of bad things could happen.
These include a Chinese military response that could result in the US being plunged into direct or indirect conflict with a nuclear armed Russia and a nuclear armed China at the same time.
If you think our European allies, who are facing an existential war with Russia over Ukraine, will join us if there is U.S.
conflict with China over Taiwan, triggered by this unnecessary visit, you are badly misreading the world.
Let's start with the indirect conflict with Russia and how Pelosi's visit to Taiwan now looms over it.
says Thomas Friedman, quote, there are moments in international relations when you need to keep your eyes on the prize. Today, that prize is crystal clear.
We must ensure that Ukraine is able at a minimum to blunt and at a maximum reverse Vladimir Putin's unprovoked invasion, which if it succeeds will pose a direct threat to the stability of the whole European Union.
To help create the greatest possibility of Ukraine reversing Putin's invasion, Biden and his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, held a series of very tough meetings with China's leadership, imploring Beijing not to enter the Ukraine conflict by providing military assistance to Russia. And particularly now when Putin's arsenal has been been diminished by five months of grinding war.
Biden, according to a senior U.S.
official, personally told President Xi Jinping that if China entered the war in Ukraine on Russia's side, Beijing would be risking access to its two most important export markets, the United States and the European Union.
China is one of the best countries in the world at manufacturing drones, which are precisely what Putin's troops need most right now.
By all indications, U.S.
officials tell me, China has responded by not providing military aid to Putin at a time when the U.S.
and NATO have been giving Ukraine intelligence support and a significant number of advanced weapons that have done serious damage to the military of Russia, China's ostensible ally.
So in other words, the Biden administration reached out to China, and under the table, they basically said to them, we need you to stop funding Russia.
And China, wishing to stay out of this thing, basically said, okay, we'll stay out of this thing for the moment.
So, says Thomas Friedman, given all of that, why in the world would the Speaker of the House choose to visit Taiwan and deliberately provoke China now, becoming the most senior U.S.
official to visit Taiwan since Newt Gingrich in 1997, when China was far weaker economically and militarily?
The timing could not be worse.
Dear reader, the Ukraine war is not over.
Privately, U.S.
officials are a lot more concerned about Ukraine's leadership than they are letting on.
There is deep mistrust between the White House and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine considerably more than has been reported.
Okay, well, what Friedman is doing here is actually sort of fascinating because what it really means, I've said this for a while, when it comes to American foreign policy, of course there's always going to be a moral component to American foreign policy because we are advancing our interests.
But advancing our interests is the morality.
In other words, there's a difference between saying, as neoliberals and neocons have said for a very long time, that advancing morality in the world It's really neoliberals who have said this.
The reading of neocons is a little bit strained, but neoliberals have said for a very long time, the Woodrow Wilson ideal, we spread democracy all over the world, okay?
The reality is that we spread America's interests over the world, and those coincide very often with democracy, but not always with democracy.
Those coincide with human rights, but unfortunately, not always with human rights, because sometimes you have to pick the best of two bad options.
Real politik, which is the generalized understanding that power matters in international relations, underscores all of this.
And so one of the things that Thomas Friedman says in this column is that the reason we're supporting Ukraine is not just because autocracy versus democracy or anything like that.
It's because we are trying to bloody Russia's nose to prevent China from looking at this and then invading Taiwan, for example.
We are trying to prevent sovereign countries from being invaded because we wish to retain the balance of power in Europe.
We should retain the deterrence on NATO's borders.
These are all very good real politic reasons for defending Ukraine.
But the way the Ukraine war was pitched to the United States public was that we were defending a nascent democracy in Ukraine against the predations of the Russians.
There's truth to that, but there are also some falsities to that.
Namely, that Ukraine remains an extraordinarily corrupt place.
I mean, we all used to talk about this.
Joe Biden used to talk about this.
He used to talk about how he threatened to withhold a billion dollars in foreign aid from Ukraine unless they fired particular prosecutors that the Obama-Biden administration thought were corrupt.
So, there are now riffs opening up between Vladimir Zelensky and, for example...
And for example, Joe Biden.
So says Thomas Friedman.
There is funny business going on in Kiev.
On July 17, Zelensky fired his country's prosecutor general and the leader of its domestic intelligence agency, the most significant shakeup in his government since the Russian invasion in February.
It would be the equivalent of Joe Biden firing Merrick Garland and Bill Burns on the same day.
But I've not seen any reporting that convincingly explains what that was all about.
It's as if we don't want to look too closely under the hood in Kiev for fear of what corruption or antics we might see when we have invested so much there.
More on the dangers of that another day.
But again, the dangers of that are a pretty significant danger, are they not?
In short, says Thomas Friedman, this Ukraine war is so not over, so not stable, so not without dangerous surprises that can pop out on any given day.
In the middle of all this, we're going to risk a conflict with China over Taiwan, provoked by an arbitrary and frivolous visit by the Speaker of the House?
It's geopolitics 101.
You don't court a two-front war with the other two superpowers at the same time.
And then he says that this could trigger some sort of indirect conflict with China.
Nancy Pelosi's visit.
He says, to be sure, there's an argument that Biden should just call Xi's bluff, back Pelosi to the hilt, and tell Xi that if he threatens Taiwan in any way, it's China that will get burned. That might work. It might feel good for a day. It might also start World War III.
In my view, Taiwan should have just asked Pelosi not to come at this time. I admire Taiwan and the economy and democracy that it has built since the end of World War II. I visited Taiwan numerous times over the past 30 years, and I've personally witnessed how much that has changed in Taiwan in that time. But there's one thing that has not changed.
It's geography.
Taiwan is still a tiny island now with 23 million people roughly 100 miles off the coast of a giant mainland China with 1.4 billion people who claim Taiwan as part of the Chinese motherland.
Places that forget their geography get in trouble.
He says, if we're going to get into a conflict with Beijing, at least let it be on our timing and our issues.
There are a bunch of buried leads here.
One of the buried leads is that we ought to start treating foreign policy with the seriousness it deserves instead of the sort of bizarre sloganeering that suggests that the reason to fight Russia in Ukraine is to preserve the possibility of gay rights in Ukraine, or the possibility of democracy in Ukraine, or because Ukraine is not corrupt.
And you can't mention the fact that, for example, the Azov Brigade, which is very active in the fight against Russia, was two years ago being reported as sort of a breeding ground for neo-Nazism, right?
You're supposed to ignore all of that.
And the reason you're supposed to ignore all of that is, of course, because President Biden is president.
If Donald Trump were president, then we would presumably be covering that in enormous ways.
But what this really spells out when it comes to Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan is that the United States has to get more serious about its foreign policy.
I keep saying this over and over.
Strong economy means strong military.
Strong military means the possibility of deterring aggressive action by America's enemies.
Posturing, instead of doing those things, is actively dangerous.
That's true whether you are posturing about Ukraine.
It's true whether you are posturing about Taiwan.
You gotta be able to back things.
There has to be a fist of steel inside the velvet glove.
If you're going to bloviate, you better be able to back up the bloviation.
I'm not sure that what Nancy Pelosi is doing here actually backs up the bloviation.
And so, Thomas Friedman happens to be kind of correct here.
And in the Biden administration's view of Nancy Pelosi's visit, happens to be, I think, rather correct.
And I'm a big backer of Taiwanese independence, straight up.
But there's what you back and there's what you can actually achieve.
And right now that's not something that is actually widely achievable.
Again, I think that it's fascinating to watch, for example.
That rift breakout between Zelensky and Joe Biden.
What needs to happen, by the way, in Ukraine is that Joe Biden actually needs to do the thing that any politician with stones would do.
He needs to say to Vladimir Zelensky, we are going to give you enough material to make a big push before the winter, and then you're making a settlement.
And I will take the blame if you can't.
I understand that 80% of your public wants to keep fighting.
I can't let you do that.
The reason I can't let you do that is because we have other interests on the globe aside from what is happening alone in Ukraine.
So, sort of a fascinating breakdown of what's going on in terms of foreign policy, where a lot of chaos is breaking out.
The United States has to stop its habit of big talk.
It's the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt, right?
Speak softly and carry a big stick, it's the opposite.
We now speak loudly and carry a very, very small stick, as it turns out, all too often.
And that leads to miscommunications.
So as it turns out, the habit of American foreign policy is to make big promises and then not fulfill them.
Well, I'll tell you who's not going to make you a big promise and not fulfill it.
People who are going to be credible with you.
Those are the folks over at American Financing.
One of the things you have to do right now is be sure that you're paying your bills at the lowest interest rates possible.
This goes for your credit cards, your mortgage, just about anything, because rates are going to continue to rise throughout the year, especially on your credit cards.
Those are already around 19% in just 10 minutes.
You can get a free mortgage review from American Financing, learn about custom loans that can save you up to $1,000 in just one month.
From flexible terms to debt consolidation, American Financing's salary-based mortgage consultants can do it all without charging any upfront or hidden fees.
American Financing can help you pre-qualify for free and possibly even delay two mortgage payments.
Just call 866-721-3300.
That's 866-721-3300.
Or visit AmericanFinancing.net, NMLS 182334, NMLSconsumerAccess.org.
A quick way for you to bankrupt yourself and save money.
And if you're looking for a free mortgage review, learn about custom loans that can save you up to $1,000 in just one month.
From flexible terms to debt consolidation, American Financing's salary-based mortgage consultants can do it all without charging any upfront or hidden fees.
Why not consolidate those loans, get it redone, see what your options are.
And that's true for your mortgage right now.
And the fact is that the rates are only going to keep going the wrong way for the foreseeable future.
So why not try to lock something in?
Talk to my friends over at American Financing right now.
Again, check them out at AmericanFinancing.net or give them a call at 866-721-3300.
All right, folks, this summer we launched Daily Wire Plus.
This is our ever-expanding hub for all things Daily Wire.
That includes movies, shows, podcasts, PragerU, kids content, that is coming soon, and Not least, the content.
My good friend Jordan Peterson.
In addition to his archive of content, you can also find his brand new podcast and lecture series on DailyWirePlus.
We're even recontextualizing some of his words, like his Genesis lecture series.
Everything looks great.
Everything is top-notch.
To watch and read the series, access the entire archive of Jordan Peterson content, head on over to DailyWirePlus.com, become a member today.
That's DailyWirePlus.com right now.
Speaking of American foreign policy, in which we spoke loudly and carried too small a stick, Afghanistan is the first case in point.
So, there was a lot of triumphalism yesterday from the Biden administration about the killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri.
That was an attempt to cover for the fact that Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in the middle of Kabul, which is the capital.
of Afghanistan, which until five minutes ago was controlled by American allied forces.
And now thanks to Joe Biden is controlled by the Taliban.
Not only was Zawahiri killed in the middle of Kabul, he was actually killed while standing on the balcony of a house that was apparently owned by a New York Times op-ed contributor.
There's a guy named Sirahuddin Haqqani, who's the deputy leader of the Taliban.
The house that al-Zawahiri was killed in was owned by Sirahuddin Haqqani, who was a member of the Haqqani Network.
These were supposed to be our friends and our allies, according to the Biden administration.
They were going to help facilitate the fight against ISIS-K.
He actually wrote a piece in the New York Times, amazing, the New York Times, which fired an opinion editor for having run a piece by Tom Cotton about the possibility of actually using the National Guard to quell riots in the United States, a widely popular position.
He was not fired and nobody at the New York Times was fired for actually running an op-ed from one of the leaders of the Taliban who actively promotes Al Qaeda members and leaders living in his house.
That piece was a masterwork of misdirection and lies.
He said in this piece, by the way.
It's worth reading some of it.
Haqqani.
He said, quote, we did not choose our war with the foreign coalition led by the United States.
We were forced to defend ourselves. The withdrawal of foreign forces has been our first and foremost demand that we today stand at the threshold of a peace agreement with the United States is no small milestone. We are aware of the concerns and questions in and outside of Afghanistan about the kind of government we would have after the foreign troops withdraw. My response to such concerns is that it will depend on a consensus among Afghans.
We should not let our worries get in the way of a process of genuine discussion and deliberation free for the first time from from foreign domination and interference.
And of course, he didn't mention the word terror anywhere in that piece, right?
Like, these are just subjects that never came up.
We were all supposed to just surrender Afghanistan in the hope that they would be really, really nice.
And that is precisely what Joe Biden did.
Well, this led to a rather awkward exchange yesterday between Peter Doocy of Fox News and John Kirby, who is the spokesperson for the National Security Council, in which Peter Doocy was like, you know, you're championing the killing of al-Zawahiri, but I noticed that you gave the entire country to terrorists.
So, we know that the Taliban was harboring the world's most wanted terrorist.
You guys gave a whole country to a bunch of people that are on the FBI most wanted list.
What did you think was going to happen?
I don't take issue with the premise that we gave a whole country to terrorist groups.
I mean, again, I'd encourage you to ask... The Taliban was harboring the world's number one terrorist.
How is that not giving a country to a terrorist?
A terrorist sympathizing group, if not giving them permission to have terrorists just sit on a balcony.
The question, I mean, Peter, the way you asked that, it makes it sound like we owned Afghanistan a year ago.
It wasn't our country.
That's kind of awkward, because we sort of did.
I mean, with our military support, the Afghan allies were still holding Kabul, and then you did hand it over to the Taliban.
But this administration did hand over the country to terrorists.
The amazing delusions under which we perform our foreign policy, the big talk is really astonishing.
And then it turns out that when hard power is brought to bear, and this is, I think, the point when it comes to American foreign policy generally, hard power is the name of the game.
Economic power, military power, these things matter.
If you're shaping a foreign policy that is designed around the idea of American ideals, you best be able to back it up.
You know what's not going to do it?
Antony Blinken trotting out there yesterday and saying that the Taliban grossly violated the Doha Agreement by hosting and sheltering Al Qaeda's top leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.
I'm sorry, that ain't gonna do it.
He said, quote, this is a statement, from the Secretary of State of the United States, quote, in the face of the Taliban's unwillingness or inability to abide by their commitments, we will continue to support the Afghan people with robust humanitarian assistance and to advocate for the protection of their human rights, especially of women and girls.
Oh, will you?
Or will you turn over the entire country to a bunch of 8th century barbarians who keep women in basements, force them to wear giant sacks that reveal only their eyes, and beat them if they go to school?
Which one?
I feel like you're not being honest, Secretary of State Blinken.
I feel like the Biden administration is not being honest.
And the occasional drone killing of a high-ranking terrorist who's in the middle of a large country that the United States attacked in 2001 as a direct result of 9-11, I feel like that's a failure on your part.
When people say that Afghanistan had no major impact on American foreign policy, Afghanistan had a massive impact on American foreign policy.
America now has to reestablish its credibility in the world.
It's done some of that in Ukraine.
But the problem is that reestablishing credibility, this is something I think that people need to understand from both a domestic and a foreign policy perspective.
Establishing credibility means you do what you say you are going to do.
It does not mean that you make big promises and then you don't fulfill them.
That doesn't establish credibility.
You're better off making small promises you can fulfill than big promises that you cannot fulfill.
Credibility is all about whether you're willing to back it up.
In Afghanistan, we were not willing to back it up.
When it comes to Ukraine, we're willing to back it up for only so long, and we'd be better off, instead of saying, this is a fight for democracy against autocracy, and that's what this is really all about, we'd be better off saying, listen, it's in America's national interest, which is good for the world, because we're the world's strongest economy, and we do stand for the spread of democracy where available, and the spread of human rights where available.
I add where available there, because it's not always available.
Otherwise, you end up in this weird box where you are having to move back and forth with the Saudis while simultaneously negotiating with the Iranians.
And something Henry Kissinger has suggested before is that you have to be very realistic about the way that you approach foreign policy.
And when you don't, you end up in rhetorical boxes of your own making, in which on the one hand, you're talking about preserving democracy in Ukraine while Vladimir Zelensky is firing all of the oversight officials in his own government, right?
This is the point that Thomas Friedman is making.
Or you could just say what's true.
America has an interest.
That interest is in stymying Russia's ability to walk all over Eastern Europe.
That interest is in denying Russia the ability to carve Ukraine in half and take all of its oil-rich resources.
America's national interest should be enough for Americans, and I think most Americans believe that it is.
But don't, do not make promises that you are not willing to fulfill.
That's exactly what happened over in Afghanistan.
Alrighty, folks, we have a lot more news to cover, but I'm out of time here on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and the like.
So, if you want to enjoy the rest of the show, become a Daily Wire Plus member right now.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash Ben and become a member today.
Alrighty, so meanwhile, the monkeypox catastrophe is upon us.
I'm not making light of monkeypox.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Bradford Carrington, executive producer Jeremy Boren, supervising producer Mathis Glover, production manager Pavel Lydowsky, associate producer Savannah Dominguez-Morris, editor Adam Sajevitz, audio mixer Mike Coromina, hair and makeup artist in wardrobe Fabiola Cristina, production coordinator Jessica Kranz.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
▲
Export Selection