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Aug. 9, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
38:51
The FBI Raids Trump | Ep. 1552
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Hey folks, I was supposed to take this week off completely for the first time in like five years, but due to the breaking news on the FBI raiding Mar-a-Lago, the biggest news in years, I'm now signing in to comment reporting live here from Israel.
So, according to the New York Times, former President Donald J. Trump said on Monday that the FBI had searched his Palm Beach, Florida home and had broken open a safe, an account signaling a major escalation in the various investigations into the final stages of his presidency.
The search, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation, appeared to be focused on material that Trump had brought with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence, when he left the White House.
Those boxes contained many pages of classified documents, according to a person familiar This is an insane thing.
It is just an insane thing.
boxes of material requested by officials with the National Archives for many months, only doing so when there became a threat of action to retrieve them.
The case was referred to the Justice Department by the Archives early this year.
This is an insane thing.
It is just an insane thing.
So here is the bottom line here.
The FBI is not trusted by many, many Americans.
I mean, a majority of Republicans do not trust the FBI, according to polling data.
A majority of independents do not trust the FBI, according to polling data.
What the FBI just did requires extraordinary institutional trust.
This is an FBI under the auspices of a current administration raiding the home of the leader of the last administration and the likeliest potential nominee for the opposition come 2024.
It seems like, on the face of it, banana republic type stuff.
It seems like, on the face of it, pretextual.
Especially because, if you're gonna do something like this, there had damned well better be a crime.
The crime can't be something like, the President of the United States, when he left office, he brought with him stuff.
Bill Clinton brought half the White House with him when he left office.
He was never raided.
It can't be the President of the United States has a battle with the National Archives over material.
It can't be about the National Archives.
It's got to be more than that.
It can't be something like the National Archives is just mad that they don't have a full record of everything that went on, especially if what we are talking about here is not particularly important material.
Then there's the problem that the last president of the United States, while he was in office, has plenary authority to declassify anything he wants.
So all the other cases that people are talking about today with regard to situations in which people have mishandled classified material, we're talking about people who are not the president of the United States.
You're talking about, for example, the former Clinton National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, who in 2015 received a misdemeanor charge for stuffing classified documents down his pants.
You're talking about in 2016, the FBI investigating Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified documentation.
She could not declassify things.
She was the Secretary of State.
She was not the President of the United States.
And by the way, she was never actually raided.
Remember, they grabbed Anthony Weiner's laptop.
You remember that they went...
in a variety of directions trying to garner Hillary Clinton's emails.
But despite the fact that James Comey announced that it was actually, quote, possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton's personal email account because of her mishandling of the classified documents, her house was never raided.
Her offices were never raided by the FBI.
And then you have several years under President Trump of the FBI attempting to undermine the President of the United States on pretextual information provided by the Clinton campaign on the basis of the Steele dossier.
You had James Comey, the former head of the FBI, when he was head of the FBI, approaching Donald Trump to launder into the press the Steele dossier.
Knowing that there was nothing in the Steele dossier that had been verified, he went to Donald Trump, he told him about it, simply so that the media could then run with the story that the Steele dossier had been presented to President Trump, and therefore it was newsworthy, and BuzzFeed could run all of that material, for example.
And then we got years and years of investigations down rabbit holes that led nowhere with regard to Russiagate.
In other words, trust in the FBI is at an all-time low, and yet it's the FBI under Christopher Wray, apparently with a warrant that had to be signed off on by the DOJ and Attorney General Merrick Garland, now initiating a raid into the former President of the United States.
So here's the thing.
Could there theoretically, in some world, be a rationale for this sort of activity?
Sure.
Sure there could.
But is that going to have to be a damned, extraordinarily Solid, like rock solid, bedrock solid rationale with serious underlying evidence.
It had better be or what we are looking at is a political crisis.
When you have current administrations investigating, former administrations to the point of sending the FBI into their homes to pick up documents on the basis of, well, you know, you didn't hand it over to the National Archives, even though we were negotiating, you didn't hand it over when we wanted you to.
That's not.
That's Banana Republic type stuff.
And it looks more like an attempt to take Donald Trump out of the running come 2024 than anything else.
Or maybe, nefariously, it's an attempt to elevate Trump for 2024.
We don't know.
But here is what we do know.
Here is what we do know.
If there is no extraordinary basis for this raid, then what we are looking at is a crisis in American governance right now.
It looks like the intelligence apparatus being weaponized against the opponents of a political administration.
Which is insane.
And what it also means is that down the road, let's say that Donald Trump runs, let's say this comes to nothing and Donald Trump runs, and let's say that Donald Trump loses.
Do you think that there are going to be a lot of people who are going to trust that he actually lost?
Again, the trust in our institutions is so low right now that they're actually activating, they're exacerbating all of the worst possibilities in American politics.
If you don't trust any aspect of how the system works, if it feels like the FBI is rigged against the President of the United States when he's Donald Trump, and then rigged against him again when he is candidate Trump come 2024.
If it feels as though all the institutions are set up in opposition to one political party and to one guy, How do you think that's going to work out?
And I'm amazed to see so many people on the left today, people who are highly critical of the cops normally, Pramila Jayapal, the progressive caucus, out there saying things like, well, you know, they wouldn't do this without a basis.
Really?
Wouldn't they?
You guys were doing defund the police five seconds ago, but now when they're targeting your political opponents, you're all in favor of it.
Listen, I'm here on the conservative side of the aisle, and I was willing to let the FBI have a lot of rope when it came to, for example, Russiagate at the very beginning.
And then it became clearer and clearer and clearer that the whole thing was a farce.
And my trust in that institution was undermined, just as many Americans' trust in that institution was undermined.
And now I'm sitting here with some very serious questions as to what the hell they think they're doing.
So they'd better get out there with the evidence, with the warrant.
The people who are doubtful, the people who think this is a crisis, they are not wrong so far, until you show the evidence.
No one is taking this one on faith.
No one.
So you'd best get out there, if you're Christopher Wray of the FBI, and show us what you are doing.
If you're Merrick Garland, you better be out there showing us what you're doing, considering that you've spent your presidency going after police departments for no reason, suggesting you're gonna go after states, if those states don't cram down gender-affirming healthcare, i.e.
sex changes on small children.
That you're going to go after parents.
Why exactly would I trust you?
According to the New York Times, the law governing the preservation of White House materials, the Presidential Records Act, lacks teeth, but criminal statutes can come into play, especially in the case of classified material.
Criminal codes which carry jail time can be used to prosecute anyone who willfully injures or commits any depredation against any property of the United States and anyone who willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys government documents.
This is such an amazing thing.
The statute that Hillary Clinton was investigated under did not suggest that she needed to have intent to, for example, give the documents to a foreign adversary or something.
All it suggested is that negligence in the handling of the documents was criminal.
James Comey, because it was politically sensitive, went out of his way, completely rewrote the statute.
Why?
Because he didn't want to indict The actual nominee of the Democratic Party at the time.
So now you have somebody who's just as important as Hillary Clinton was in 2016.
More important because this guy's been President of the United States.
And you're trotting out the Presidential Records Act here?
According to the New York Times, the items in the boxes seized by the FBI included documents, mementos, gifts, and letters.
The archives did not describe the classified material it found, other than to say it was classified national security information.
The question of how Trump handled classified material is complicated because as president, he has the authority to declassify any government information.
It is unclear whether Trump, before leaving office, had declassified the materials the archives discovered in the boxes.
They don't even know whether he declassified this stuff?
And they're still raiding him?
If that is what this boils down to, some sort of miscommunication in which the FBI goes after the former president of the United States for a raid on his home because there was some miscommunication about the identification of documents, there's going to be hell to pay.
There really will be.
The adjudication of how this is going to work in our politics going forward, when it feels like, correctly, if this is nothing, if it feels like all of the institutions of our government have been mobilized against one side, things are going to get really, really, really ugly.
Alrighty, folks.
As I said, I'm actually on vacation.
I signed in just to give you an update on this particular topic because it's so unbelievable and insane.
Now, onto a special episode of this podcast focusing on just why Joe Biden is to blame for your high gas prices.
He's trying to shy away from that.
He is lying.
He is to fault for his bad environmental policies which led to your high prices at the tank.
We'll get to that right now.
As gas prices remain near record highs, we examine the long-term democratic policies that led to gas shortages around the country.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Joe Biden and team, they're out there bragging about what amounts to a somewhat minimal decrease in the price of gas over the course of the last 60 days or so.
When I say somewhat minimal, I mean compared to the rise in gas prices that we have seen thus far.
Gas has now decreased in price from somewhere around the $5 per gallon mark.
to somewhere closer to the $4 per gallon mark that is still way too high for the vast majority of Americans.
And Joe Biden has suggested that this was all due to supply chain issues.
It was all due to Vladimir Putin.
But the reality is that the high gas prices that we have seen under Joe Biden are not a coincidence.
In fact, if you look at the gas prices under Joe Biden, what you see is a consistent increase month over month, pretty much the entire time up until the recent decrease in gas prices.
And this is not any sort of wonder.
The American Action Forum put out a chart showing exactly what gas prices have done under Joe Biden when Joe Biden took office.
The gas prices were $2.25 a gallon.
So when you're talking about, you know, oh, wow, they've gone down a lot.
Well, now they're $4 a gallon.
That's still almost twice as high as they were when Joe Biden took office.
And he took a bunch of measures, almost immediately, that exacerbated the price of oil and made it much, much higher.
And to understand what exactly he did and why he did it, you have to understand that this was all part of the plan.
So one of the big things that the left has said for years and years and years and years is that carbon-based fossil fuels are the worst thing in the world.
They are just terrible.
They're ruining everything.
They're leading to climate change.
And climate change is going to devastate the planet.
It's going to lead to hundreds of millions of people dead, billions of people displaced.
It's gonna be an absolute Al Gore-like hellscape in which the polar bears are drowning in the oceans and all the rest of it.
Now, all the predictions Al Gore made so far have been wrong.
All of the talk about how the Arctic ice would just be gone, how all the ice in Greenland would be melted, all of that is just untrue.
The notion that tens and hundreds of thousands of people have been affected by predominantly climate change, that's not the reality.
The reality is that the number of people who are dying thanks to natural disasters is down wildly over the course of the last 100 years.
As Michael Schellenberger says, deaths from natural disasters have declined over 90% over the last 100 years.
Neither the International Panel on Climate Change nor any other reputable scientific body predicts that that trend is going to reverse itself.
We now produce 25% more food than we consume, and experts agree surpluses will continue to rise so long as poor nations gain access to fertilizer irrigation roads and other key elements of modern agriculture.
So sure, it'd be great if the climate remained stable, but if the cost of keeping the climate the same right now is no more carbon use, what you will get is actually massively more death.
You'll get starvation.
You'll get serious problems in particularly third world countries.
And here is the thing.
Human beings are pretty good at adaptation.
We are good at building seawalls, for example.
We are good at hardening our infrastructure.
We are also, as it turns out, good at innovating.
As Schellenberger points out, carbon emissions have been declining in the United States for nearly a decade and a half thanks to cheap natural gas, which made electricity cheaper than it otherwise would have been.
That would have been the fracking boom that you constantly hear about.
In fact, says Schellenberger, experts have long recognized that while the early stages of a nation's industrialization can increase air pollution, later stages can lower it through cleaner burning coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy.
Those technologies and others allowed conventional air pollutants to peak in developed nations in the 60s and 70s.
A new report by the International Energy Agency, the IEA, forecast carbon emissions in 2040 to be lower than in almost all of the current IPCC scenarios.
So what you see very often, the headlines from the IPCC are, climate is going to rise by 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, vast wildfires, everything burns, no mitigation tactics, no adaptation tactics, and that just isn't true.
So again, the simple fact of the matter is that innovation is the way out of this.
Adaptation is the way out of this.
But the left doesn't like those things.
And one of the reasons the left doesn't like those things is because the left sees global inequality as a moral issue.
And so the idea is that economic growth by quote-unquote first world nations is unjust.
And therefore the only way to fix this is by those first world nations paying exorbitant sums of money to third world countries.
And then also simultaneously telling those countries that they have no ability to industrialize.
They need to cut down on their industrialization, or that we need to radically ratchet back our own economic power in order to make room for those non-industrialized nations to industrialize.
And somehow we're supposed to get China and India on board for this, which of course is not going to happen in any way, shape or form.
What this boils down to, in sort of practical domestic terms, is an attempt to cut off The oil supply of the United States in order to ratchet up the cost of oil, thus to make it more comparatively advantageous to engage in green energy generation.
The idea is that carbon-based fossil fuels are extraordinarily efficient.
They're very, very cheap.
And other forms of alternative energy are not nearly as cheap and not nearly as effective.
That's true of wind.
It's true of solar.
It's true of pretty much everything except for nuclear.
You can't power your car with nuclear energy.
So, what they're attempting to do is, this is part of the goal.
The goal is to artificially raise the price of oil and natural gas.
This is why they've talked, for example, about a global carbon tax.
A global carbon tax means it will cost you more to fill up your car.
They're trying to push you toward the quote-unquote green transition.
This is part of the plan.
This is not part of like some sort of giant unexpected event that occurred.
Part of the plan is drive up the price of oil.
And so then when the price of oil goes up and people get mad, then the Biden administration tries to blame it on something else.
But the reality is, again, like inflation, this is part of the plan.
They're okay with high gas prices.
High gas prices are good.
They force you to think about getting a Tesla, even if you can never afford a Tesla.
They force you to think about driving less than taking a bicycle.
This is something the left really wants.
And Joe Biden has been on this hobby horse for a long time.
Here's a flashback to Joe Biden in 2019 talking about how he wants to end drilling on federal land.
I've argued against any more oil drilling or gas drilling on federal lands and to stop that.
I think we should in fact be looking at what exists now and making a judgment whether or not those in fact that are there, those wells that are there, Whether or not they're dangerous, whether or not they've already done the damage, and what we can do from there by trying to change the attitude of the members of the governors of the various state and state legislatures.
So he's trying to cut down on, I mean, he's openly saying this stuff in 2019.
What if we just stopped drilling on federal lands?
Get the states to stop the drilling in their states?
In September 2020, Joe Biden, then candidate Biden, made a major policy speech about climate change.
And he suggested that it was incumbent on America to take a leadership position.
Now, this is something that you hear a lot from people on the left.
So I have a lot of friends on the left who tend to be pretty hawkish on climate change.
And what they are constantly saying is, well, sure, it's true that China and India are the biggest world emitters.
And sure, it's true that the emissions in the United States are going down.
But unless we take a leadership position, are those other countries really going to get on board?
And the answer is, they're not getting on board even if we take a leadership position.
They just look at us like we're suckers.
Obviously.
But the idea here for Joe Biden is that he promotes this big lie.
And the big lie with regard to climate change is if we engage in all sorts of massively expensive environmentalist transactions and regulations, that this somehow is going to be a boon for the American economy.
He never explains how this is so.
But here is Joe Biden saying just that in September of 2020.
The unrelenting impact of climate change affects every single solitary one of us.
But too often, The brunt falls disproportionately on communities of color, exacerbating the need for environmental justice.
Sorry, that's a bug.
Speaking of the environment.
These are interlocking crises of our time.
It requires action, not denial.
It requires leadership, not scapegoating.
It requires the President to meet the threshold duty of the office.
To care.
To care for everyone.
It's about caring, guys.
It's about caring.
You have to pay higher gas prices so that Joe Biden can be perceived as a caring person while he's attacked by bugs in a field in Delaware.
And here's the thing.
He's pretty clear about what this means.
He says that the entire electricity sector has to stop producing carbon-based energy.
I mean, I don't know how he intends to effectuate this change other than by crushing the American economy and by making carbon-based energy more expensive.
Transforming the electrical sector power To produce power without carbon pollution will be the greatest spur to job creation and economic competitiveness in the 21st century, not to mention the positive benefits to our health And our environment.
This is the same garbage that Joe Biden was pitching, that Barack Obama was pitching back in 2008.
He was saying, well, if we just dump money into green subsidies, then we'll have green jobs and those green jobs will spur economic growth.
Nope.
It turns out, Solyndra, it turns out that when you dump billions of dollars into bad boondoggle projects, it doesn't create jobs.
It just wastes an enormous amount of money and makes everything more expensive for people.
But this is all part and parcel of the plan.
Again, the plan is you subject the American economy to the headwinds of terrible environmental policy.
And all of this is good, because it shows American leadership, Powerful economic force and third world countries, which are backwards in their economies and in their fuel production.
And so what this means is that we, he said over and over, I mean, this is not a secret.
Joe Biden over and over has been a critic of drilling, of new energy production.
He's shut down all of the investments that are directed at refineries.
Like this is a thing that Joe Biden does.
It's something he's interested in doing.
So here is Joe Biden talking about how he wants to essentially end as much drilling as he can, circa 2020.
No more subsidies for fossil fuel industry.
No more drilling on federal lands.
No more drilling, including offshore.
No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill.
Period.
Ends.
OK, well, again, he says it over and over again.
I mean, this is not a secret.
This is the part.
They're not they're not hiding the ball on this stuff.
Biden 2020.
We're going to end fossil fuels.
I want you to just take a look, OK?
You don't have to agree, but I want you to look in my eyes.
I guarantee you.
I guarantee you.
We're going to end fossil fuel and I am not going to cooperate with you, okay?
He guarantees they're going to end fossil fuel.
Might that involve a higher price for you as you look into his bleary old eyes right there?
In May 2020, he vowed that he was going to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, which was going to ship a lot of natural gas and oil down from Canada.
And he said this, quote, Biden strongly opposes the Keystone pipeline.
And so what exactly did Joe Biden do when he got into office?
Obama and Secretary Kerry to reject it in 2015, and will proudly stand in the Roosevelt room again as president and stop it for good by rescinding the Keystone XL pipeline permit, said Steph Feldman, Biden's policy director.
Again, none of this was any sort of shock.
And so what exactly did Joe Biden do when he got into office?
Well, he pursued exactly all of these policies, right?
He pursued all of them.
So according, again, to that chart from the American Action Forum, which is a really good chart showing what exactly happened with the oil and gas prices.
So again, the price of oil and gas, the gas prices per gallon, $2.25 as of January 4th, 2021.
Joe Biden enters office.
The first thing he does is he issues a memo suspending the authority of local Bureau of Land Management offices to approve leases, drilling permits, and mining operations and cancels Keystone XL.
Just a couple of days later, he signs an executive order to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, quote-unquote, and to halt oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters.
And then, by like March 4th, he has updated the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions.
Okay, so by now, the prices of gas are about $2.60 a gallon, so it's risen $0.35 in like the first month of his administration.
Then if you fast forward to June of 2021, he suspends oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
And gas is already at three bucks a gallon at this point.
By August of 2021, he's calling on OPEC producers to increase the supply because it turns out that people are feeling the pain and feeling the pressure.
It's amazing.
So all of his policies have now wildly exacerbated oil prices.
There's been an increase of almost a buck in the gas prices by the time we hit August.
And as we see, it's all because of the policies that he has pursued, and he blames everybody else.
Like everyone, he blames.
It's just an amazing, amazing thing.
If you continue along the timeline...
In November of 2021, he announced new regulations for methane emissions that of course increased the price of natural gas.
And then, a few days later, he sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission encouraging investigation into oil and gas companies and retail gasoline prices.
So at the same time that he's jacking up all the preconditions for producing and refining oil, he is also blaming them for the rising oil and gas prices.
In December, by now the price is almost $3.50 a gallon.
He's proposing increasing royalty rates on domestic oil production and limiting available areas for development.
He also acknowledged that he was studying shutting down the Michigan Line 5 pipeline.
By the time we hit February of 2022, we've now hit $3.50 a gallon, and he has indefinitely delayed planned oil and gas leases on public land.
By March, the DOJ is declining to appeal court rulings vacating oil and gas lease sales, and you're starting to see the spike.
You're now about, you're at $3.60 a gallon.
So remember, it was $2.25 a gallon when he entered office.
Okay, this is about the time, like beginning of March, when you start to see a major spike in gas prices.
But again, remember, you've already had an increase from $2.25 to about $3.60 without Putin.
Then Putin invades Ukraine.
And one of the reasons that that exacerbated the oil and natural gas prices is because when you cut off domestic oil production, it makes you more dependent on foreign sources of oil and natural gas.
And when you declare that you're not going to buy the foreign oil and natural gas, the prices go up.
You have restricted supply.
Thus, when you further restrict supply, the prices go up even more.
So, all of this was part and parcel of the plan.
I mean, this notion that it wasn't part of the plan is ridiculous.
By the way, long-term policies have long-term effects.
Gabrielle Hoffman has a good piece over at RealClearEnergy talking about this.
She says inflation has emerged as the top issue for most Americans ahead of the midterm elections rising labor cost energy prices interest rates are increasingly adding to inflationary woes and much to the Biden's administration's chagrin the 1.9 trillion dollar American rescue plan is the largest driver of inflation.
Additionally, Democrats refuse to admit their push for environmental, social, and governance, especially in energy policy, in both the public and private sectors is also a major problem.
This is correct, right?
Of the three ESG prongs, the E-factor, which accounts for environmental stewardship and natural resources development in business practices, is primarily contributing to inflation.
As it turns out, when you, in the stock market, basically dictate that in order to invest, you must abide by ESG diktat, And those ESG diktats require you to not invest in oil and natural gas.
Why do you think refineries are shutting down?
Why do you think long-term drilling operations are not taking place despite the increase in the price of oil?
Normally, when you have a supply-demand curve, when the demand radically outpaces supply, you have an increase in supply to meet it.
But what happens when there's a ramp-up period between when there's an imbalance between supply and demand and when the demand can actually start to meet, when the supply can actually start to meet the demand?
Well, when it comes to oil and natural gas, there's an actual delay period, right?
You can't immediately just increase the oil and natural gas.
You have to build new wells.
You have to refine.
You have to create all this infrastructure.
That takes years of investment.
What if you spent years telling people they're not allowed to invest in this stuff because of ESG?
And what if you tell them, okay, well, we're having a current price spike.
We need new production.
And they say, well, yeah, that takes five years.
And I know that in three years, you guys are just going to shut this stuff down again because of ESG.
Forget three years.
In six months, you're going to shut this stuff down again because of ESG.
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Global, calls this phenomenon greenflation.
In fall 2021, Shah warned how the push to transition away from fossil fuels, notably in the form of advancing net-zero policies, quote, created a chain reaction resulting in higher energy prices and ultimately higher consumer costs.
She also explained how N-inflation, like environmental inflation, is adding to uncertainty by way of carbon credits, harsh penalties for companies that fail to meet UN climate targets, and increased investment in technology, along with R&D, for instance.
American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Summers blamed the Biden administration's misguided energy policies, namely their decarbonization push for compounds and inflationary pressures.
Ultimately, consumers will be burdened by this inflation because costs are passed down to them.
Columbia University's Lucas Toe explains the transition to 100% wind and solar energy will be expensive, writing, quote, The reality is that wind and solar are only cheap during the early stages of the transition.
Currently, states with existing renewable portfolio standards paid $125.2 billion more in electricity costs compared to states without them.
So much for fossil fuel investments being lucrative.
As a result, some corporations are recommitting to oil and gas.
Earlier this year, BlackRock modified its interpretation of the E-prong by supporting fossil fuel investments to not jeopardize business opportunities in Texas.
So again, the E here is having significant ramifications for the ability to even produce the kinds of things that you need to produce in order to make gas prices go down, in order to ramp up the possibility of doing this sort of stuff.
And this is why, for example, you have seen a lack of refinery production.
Joe Biden keeps yelling at the refiners.
He keeps yelling at the oil companies.
But the simple fact is that they can't really lower the prices by themselves, because oil refineries across the country, according to the Washington Post, are being retired and converted to other uses, as owners balk at making costly upgrades, and America's pivot away from fossil fuels leaves their future uncertain.
Five refineries have shut down in the United States in just the past two years, reducing the nation's refining capacity by about 5%, eliminating more than 1 million barrels of fuel per day from the market, leaving the remaining facilities straining to meet demand.
So, how can they reopen when there is no long-term prospect of actually profitability, thanks to Joe Biden and Democrats intervening in this sort of stuff?
Joe Biden, meanwhile, he's been blaming the gas companies, but the gas companies are pointing out, you're making it really, really difficult for us.
You make it difficult, and then you whine when we can't produce the stuff that you want us to produce.
According to upstreamonline.com, in a letter sent in June to a list of companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, Phillips 66, Marathon Petroleum, and BP, Biden chastised the companies.
He said at a time of war, historically high refinery profit margins being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable.
But Chevron called for policies that underpin continued investment in oil and gas rather than the obstructive approach that Joe Biden has been using thus far.
The oil companies then sent a written statement out.
They said, we want to underscore that U.S.
refineries are running at high utilization rates.
Refinery capacity expansion is a long-term proposition given permitting, engineering design, capital cost estimates, and equipment procurement.
So the idea that they can just ramp up production is not true.
But Joe Biden has to find somebody to blame for his own bad policy.
And so, of course, he has spent the last several months, up to a year, blaming everybody but himself.
In October of 2021, remember, as of October of 2021, we were already looking at gas prices that were hovering just under $3.50 per gallon.
And so it had already risen by well over a dollar under Joe Biden.
At that point, Joe Biden said the gas prices would come down.
They did not.
Do you have a timeline for gas prices and when you think they may start coming down?
My guess is you'll start to see gas prices come down as we get by and going into the winter.
I mean, excuse me, end of next year in 2022.
Oh, midwinter to next.
Oh, uh-huh.
Is that been happening right now?
Then Joe Biden blamed OPEC for the high gas prices.
This is November of 2021.
If you take a look at gas prices and you take a look at oil prices, that is a consequence of, thus far, the refusal of Russia or the OPEC nations to pump more oil.
Oh, by the way, that was in November.
That was well before the Ukraine war.
He's blaming OPEC.
Okay, so now fast forward to March, and you've seen a gas spike again.
And he says, well, we can't really do much because Russia's responsible.
Well, you could have done something about the more than a dollar increase in gas prices before Russia invaded Ukraine.
And as it turns out, You can't have it both ways.
Joe Biden both wants to quote unquote, fight the war in Ukraine, but also blame the war in Ukraine for the high gas prices.
Well, which is it?
Because if you believe that the war in Ukraine is causing the high gas prices, why don't you open up the gas production and lower the amount of money that we're paying for the oil and natural gas right now?
Because his real priority is the environmental component of the left-wing agenda.
So here's Joe Biden in March, blaming of course, Russia.
Gonna go up.
Can't do much right now.
Russia's responsible.
Russia's responsible.
He said the same day.
He's doing everything he could to minimize Putin's price hike.
That's not true.
If that were true, then he would have been loosening all of the leases and regulations that are necessary in order to actually do this stuff.
He'd be allowing us to drill.
He'd be encouraging oil companies to invest.
But he's not.
Here Joe Biden was in March of 2022 saying that he was going to do everything possible to fix this thing.
Putin's war is already hurting American families at the gas pump.
Since Putin began his military build-up on Ukrainian borders, just since then, the price of the gas at the pump in America went up 75 cents.
And with this action, it's going to go up further.
I'm going to do everything I can to minimize Putin's price hike here at home.
Oh, well then you didn't.
So by June, he was just mocking the oil companies.
It was their fault.
So we've got Russia, OPEC, the oil companies, everybody except for the person who's putting restrictions on energy supply in the United States.
Here's Joe Biden in June.
You said that your administration has largely criticized the oil and gas industry and at times vilified it and that the administration would need to take a change in approach in order to make progress on reducing energy prices and to increase supply.
Do you have a reaction to that, sir?
It's mildly sensitive.
Look, we need more refining capacity.
This idea that they don't have oil to drill and to bring up is simply not true.
This piece of the Republicans talking about Biden shutdown feels wrong.
9,000 of them, okay?
Okay, no, what's wrong is that everybody understands that you prevented more drilling from taking place, more long-term investment.
He says, we need more refinery capacity.
The refineries were operating at 94, 95% capacity already.
Where do you think that flex capacity is going to come from, you dolt?
They actively pursue these policies.
And then, of course, there are unintended consequences.
And this, of course, leads to humiliating moments like Joe Biden having to fist-bump Saudi dictator Mohammed bin Salman, begging him for oil because, as it turns out, your bad long-term environmental policy actually has some pretty significant ramifications for the American people.
So here's Joe Biden fist-bumping the Saudis.
is after declaring them the world's worst human rights violators and all the rest of this stuff.
And there he is sort of staggering out of his car and fist bumping Mohammed bin Salman and begging him for oil.
Oh, by the way, he also relieved sanctions on Venezuela.
So you got Nicolas Maduro, one of the world's worst dictators, and he's begging him for oil.
Now, here's the thing.
Why doesn't he just change tactics, right?
Why doesn't he change?
If this is all about making sure that Americans are actually able to get the oil that they need, the gas that they need, the energy that they need, then why doesn't he change tactics?
After all, Europe kind of is.
If you look at what Europe has been doing, Europe has actually been reclassifying green to include natural gas.
Joe Biden isn't doing any of that.
And the answer is, because again, this is part of the agenda.
Pretending it's not, this is the goal.
The goal of raising prices is a goal.
It is not an accidental byproduct.
They want the prices higher.
They say it openly.
Here's Jennifer Granholm, the Energy Secretary in May of 2021, saying, you know what?
Sure, we're having some gas shortages, but it is pushing us toward a green transition.
We obviously are all in on making sure that we meet the president's goals of getting to 100% clean electricity by 2035 and net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
And, you know, if you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you, clearly.
So, if you were driving an electric car, right, if you just bought yourself a $100,000 electric car, then everything would have been totally fine.
This administration, this is what they actually think.
Here's Joe Biden in March of 2022.
He says, we're moving away from fossil fuels.
He says this in the middle of that price hike that he's blaming on Vladimir Putin.
We can't keep the combustion engine the way it has been.
It's even, you see what's happening in locomotives now, you know, and you see what's happening just across the board.
So and I think it presents an enormous opportunity, enormous opportunity to improve the health of the public overall.
Number one, because we're moving in the direction and we don't need to propel most of what we have in the future by with regard to oil products.
Tremendous opportunity.
Jennifer Granholm, one week later, again, this in the middle of Putin's price hike, saying this is great.
We're transitioning green energy.
What's the problem?
The reduction of supply of natural gas and oil from Russia creates a moment that we should be acting.
I mean, we heard President Zelensky.
We do not want to see any country that is held hostage to Vladimir Putin.
And this is a moment for Congress to be able to act.
There can be a compromise.
There can be movement on this.
And whether it's, you know, I mean, what the form is and sponsors are and all of that, that's a that's a conversation that's happening.
But the bottom line is, this is a moment to have this happen.
It's an urgent moment.
It's an urgent moment.
It's great.
By the way, Joe Biden says in May of this year, when this is over, we'll have transition agreement.
It'll all be great.
Everything's awesome.
And when it comes to the gas prices, We're going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it's over, we'll be stronger and the world will be stronger, unless we rely on fossil fuels when this is over.
Oh, well, then it seems like this was part of your agenda all along, sir.
So you get to blame it on everybody else when this is part of your agenda, making the gas more expensive.
And of course, this month, literally this month, Jennifer Granholm was bragging that Joe Biden is pursuing the most ambitious green climate push in human history.
This is amidst the push that we're having right now for a $433 billion green energy boondoggle.
These geniuses.
We are pursuing these very ambitious goals, most ambitious in history, which is to reduce our CO2 emissions in half by 2030, 100% clean electricity by 2035, and net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
That's what it is.
Okay, so let's stop pretending that this wasn't part of the agenda.
It is part of the agenda.
So when they say that it's everybody else's fault, that the gas prices are high, nope, this is a goal.
This is an explicit goal of the environmentalist movement.
It is something Joe Biden has been pushing for literally years.
And so don't try to let Democrats get away with the idea that this is anyone's fault, but theirs.
This was part of the plan.
A lot of things Democrats do that have bad unintended consequences.
This is not one of them.
This was one of the intended consequences.
Alrighty, we'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.
more, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
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