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Aug. 26, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:18
I Am Darth Vader | Ep. 1562
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Podcast movement abjectly apologizes to the left for my bodily presence at one of their conferences.
The White House dunks on people who took PPP money so they can push student loan bailouts.
And Mark Zuckerberg admits the FBI calls him to warn him about Russian propaganda just before Hunter's laptop story broke.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
Protect your online privacy today at expressvpn.com slash ben.
We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Well, there's been a widespread feeling among people on the right in the United States that they're being excluded from all of the major institutions of American life.
That if people allow them to be part of big events, for example, if people allow them part of a marketplace, that is just because they're doing it at their own sufferance.
The basic idea here is that you are so bad that you could maybe, maybe be allowed to participate in a sort of common space.
But in reality, under the surface, people don't want you to be part of that common space.
They want you out.
And there are people on the left who say this is paranoid.
No, no, no.
We want you to be part of the common space.
We may not like your opinions, we may disagree with you, but the reality is that we want you to be part of this big, broad conversation.
And that has been the pitch of the so-called free speech left for a very long time.
And the left is now dividing itself between liberals, people who believe in that concept, and the hardcore radical left, which is increasingly taking over institution after institution and then saying that people who disagree with us must be excluded entirely from those institutions.
As you may know, this right here is the biggest political podcast in America, which means on planet Earth, this political podcast.
Thank God.
Thanks to you, the listeners.
We have millions of people who engage with the show every single day.
And our podcast network at Daily Wire is the sixth biggest podcast network on planet Earth.
And so when we decided that we were going to take a booth at a conference that, frankly, I'd never heard of called Podcast Movement, This was sort of a sign that we were just going to be part of the community of nations, so to speak.
We're part of the podcasting community.
We're reaching out to advertisers, reaching out to other podcasting networks, trying to find maybe new employees.
It's just like any other professional conference.
So we spent a little bit of money, got a podcast booth.
And that was pretty much it, right?
The event went on over the course of the weekend.
There's this big podcast movement event in Dallas.
It happens every year.
It's been growing every year because the podcasting industry has been growing every single year.
Well, I got a call from my business partner, Jeremy Boring, a few days ago, and he said, do you mind flying into Dallas for an event that is not really attached to podcast movement?
Somebody's having a retirement party.
Do you mind actually coming in for that to celebrate this person's retirement?
I said, sure, no problem.
So I flew in.
And we happened to be at the Podcast Movement booth that we had paid for at Podcast Movement.
And he said, you know, let's just take a walk around the floor.
Okay, that's literally all that happened.
I came to this Podcast Movement event, this conference, and I walked around the floor.
And this prompted such spasms of apoplexy, it beggars the mind.
It really is an amazing thing.
So I want to begin this story by showing you exactly what it was like when I was walking around podcast movement.
Because in order for you to understand the reaction from the left to my mere physical presence in this space, you have to understand just how intimidating I am.
According to the left, I'm one of the most intimidating people on planet Earth.
I'm just, I'm absolutely terrifying.
I am scary.
I am threatening.
I'm Darth Vader, right?
I am just, if I walk into a room, you don't know if I'm going to force choke you.
You don't know that I'm going to strike you down with my lightsaber.
You just don't know.
I am a dangerous human being, according to the left.
And you can see it on the video.
Okay, this is video of me at Podcast Movement.
Again, this is sort of a spontaneous drop by because we paid for a booth.
And, you know, you want to check out the events, you just sort of walk around.
This is all that happened at Podcast Movement.
And then wait until you hear the reaction, because it's astonishing.
So here is the actual video.
Nice suit though.
So, yep, that's me shaking some hands with some people who want to take some pictures.
That's the whole thing.
That's the whole thing.
Thank you so much, I appreciate it.
Thank you, I'm excited about it.
That's great.
Thank you so much.
This is awesome.
I can't wait to see you.
The next two days, I'll be so excited.
Great, thanks.
That's the whole thing.
So I literally walked around the floor, I shook some hands, and I walked out.
This prompted podcast movement to issue a full-scale groveling apology for my presence The reason being, there was a trans person who was in a 300-yard radius of where I was standing.
And this person tweeted at Podcast Movement with their 150 followers and said, quote, as a trans person, as a queer person, as someone with a uterus, this does not make me feel welcome.
This does not make me feel safe.
Well, clearly I was making people feel unsafe by, you know, standing there and taking pictures with people.
I didn't even notice this human being.
I couldn't have picked this person out of a crowd.
I don't remember this person.
Also, I'd like to note that if you have a uterus, this makes you a woman.
Listen, I'm a very scary individual.
In fact, as it turns out, a lot of people lose sleep over my very presence.
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Podcast Movement then put out a statement.
And remember, we are the sixth biggest podcast publisher on planet Earth.
My show is the biggest political podcast on planet Earth.
Tens of millions of dollars from advertising agencies are earned every year from the show.
And those people pay for podcast movement.
So podcast movement put out the following tweet thread.
And this is so indicative of where we are in politics today.
It really is.
And you want to know how you got Trump?
You want to know how you got political polarization?
You want to know how you got a bunch of people in this country who believe that they are being excised from the public square?
Hi folks.
We owe you an apology before sessions kick off for the day.
Yesterday afternoon, Ben Shapiro briefly visited the PM22 Expo area near the Dailyware booth.
Though he was not registered or expected, we take full responsibility for the harm done by his presence.
The harm done by my presence.
I mean, it was amazing.
People were just keeling over.
They had to actually triage the wounded at local hospitals.
Just the damage done by my very presence.
I mean, this is the sort of power I wield, by the way.
My employees know this.
I walk into a room and it's basically like Moses coming down from the mount when his face is shining.
He has to put on a mask just to make sure that he doesn't hurt the people around him accidentally.
That's me when I walk into a room.
Except with death and chaos.
Podcast movement then continued.
There's no way around it.
We agreed to sell The Daily Wire a first-time booth based on the company's large presence in podcasting.
The weight of that decision is now painfully clear.
Painfully clear.
Shapiro is a co-founder.
A drop-in, however unlikely, should have been considered a possibility.
And then they continue along these lines.
Just continues.
Those of you who called this unacceptable are right.
In nine wonderful years growing and celebrating this medium, PM has made mistakes.
The pain caused by this one will always stick with us forever on their deathbeds.
The founders of PM are going to be thinking back about the pain that this caused to people who were literally just standing there in a general radius of my extraordinarily dangerous visage.
I mean, I'm a dangerous man, gang.
I was noting to Fabby, our makeup artist, this morning.
I'm not sure, in modern American political history, there's ever been a larger gap between the sort of rhetoric that is used about the dangers that I posed and the human being about whom this is spoken.
It really is an amazing thing.
Look at me, for God's sake.
Really?
This?
This is what you're so scared of?
You pathetic, mewling babies?
Like, really?
The pain caused by this one will always stick with us forever.
Forever!
Literally shaking.
People just screaming, crying to the heavens.
Why God?
Why would you allow this?
We promise that sponsors will be more carefully considered moving forward, says podcast movement.
They tweeted this out yesterday at 6.33am.
Just to clarify, No daily wear representatives were scheduled to appear on panels and Shapiro remained in the common space and did not have a badge.
If you have questions, we're here to talk.
Thank you for reading.
We hope you'll continue to join us from here on out.
I know you better have some crisis managers on hand.
We need some psychologists.
We need to make sure my mere presence.
OK, so I just want to point out right here.
That those of us who believe that men exist and women exist, we are accused because we believe that men exist and women exist and that people who claim to be members of the opposite sex are not in fact members of the opposite sex.
Because we say that, we are accused of things like erasure.
You're saying that trans people don't exist.
No, I'm saying people with gender dysphoria do exist.
People with gender identity disorder do exist.
I'm saying you are not a member of the opposite sex.
That's what I'm saying.
If you want to talk about quote-unquote erasure, if you want to talk about the idea of denying people's right to exist, how about this person exists in a space, he needs to go away because his very presence threatens me.
I'm not sure I've ever heard the questioning of someone's existence more clearly and obviously than that.
This is a major podcasting event.
Every major podcasting company shows up to this, from Disney to Apple.
Everyone shows up.
Spotify.
They're all there.
We're the only ones who earn the ire of podcast movements to the extent that they put out a four-tweet thread explaining how objectively sorry they are for my physical being.
Well, I'm not going to apologize for being a human who breathes oxygen in a space.
I'm not going to do that.
I'm not going to do that.
And the fact that the left, that many people on the left want that to happen is just that.
And listen, there's some people on the left who came out and they said, this is ridiculous.
And some, some names sort of popped to mind here.
Yashar Ali is not a person on the right.
He on, he's on Twitter saying this is ridiculous.
Ryan Grim over the intercept.
He said he's on Twitter saying this is ridiculous, but I have a question.
All these so-called free speech podcasting companies, the Spotify's and the Disney's what the crooked media company.
Where are you guys?
Seriously, I have a question for you.
Where are you guys?
Because I know that on this show, I've said many, many times before, that if you want to know the truth about what is fact and what is opinion in politics, and you're listening to podcasts, what you should do is you should listen to shows like this one, and then you should listen to Pod Save America, which is a crooked podcast, and then what you should do is you should see what is the common basis of fact, the stuff that we're saying that's the same, that's the fact, everything else is the opinion.
I recommended that you listen to shows on the other side.
People on the other side of the aisle, for all of their talk about tolerance and diversity and free speech, If they are not willing to stand up and say that conferences should include the most mainstream representative of the podcast right, this show has well in excess of 35 million listeners a month.
Well in excess of it.
If you are not willing to say that sort of stuff clearly and openly, then why exactly would I trust that you want to be part of the political discourse rather than just to monopolize and dominate?
It's disgusting.
Your silence is rather deafening here.
Because let's be real about this.
If you were banned from podcast movement, I would say something.
I have.
I've spent my life saying things about this.
But all right.
I mean, if this is the way you want it, this is the way you want it.
If you want parallel economies, if you want parallel podcasting universes, if you want parallel advertising, if that's what you want, that is what you're going to get.
You're going to get it right in the face.
The left is cruising for a bruising and they are asking for it.
And when it comes, Listen, we launched Jeremy's Razors on the basis that Harry's Razors pulled their advertising and ripped into our listeners.
And we made a lot of money off of Jeremy's Razors.
That company has been in existence for like a few months.
And that company has almost 100,000 subscribers to it.
We are willing to do this to all of you.
Because if you wish to excise us, if you wish to cast us out into the cornfield, we're not all just going away.
Half the country isn't just going away.
Our mere presence, threatening you, we're not just leaving.
We're not just going to surrender the playing field to all of you.
So keep going.
Seriously, do it.
Dare us.
Continue.
We're not going to surrender to all of these people who simply wish us to disappear.
That's not something that we are going to do.
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All righty.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is out there suggesting that if you're on the other side of the aisle from Joe Biden, this makes you a semi-fascist.
He is doing this at the exact same time.
He is cramming down via completely unconstitutional executive authority, a mass student loan bailout directed specifically at his own political allies.
So yesterday, Joe Biden was back on the campaign trail.
People on the left are just, they are so excited because Joe Biden's approval rating, according to Gallup, get ready for this, guys.
It's up to 44%.
Ooh, ah, wow.
It's just, ooh, ooh, I'm intimidated.
He's up to 44%.
He was all the way down to 38% in June.
He's up to 44%.
He was all the way down to 38% in June.
He's up to 44% in August.
And according to Gallup, this means that he is now rising.
Rising Joe.
Wow.
The increase in Biden's job approval rating is largely buoyed by political independents, whose approval rose from 31% last month to the current 40%.
Well, I mean, if independents love him by a margin of they hate him 6 to 4, I don't know what Republicans are going to do.
It is worth noting here, by the way, that Donald Trump's approval ratings were 44% in October of 2018.
Within a couple of weeks, the Democrats had won 41 seats in the House.
So before you guys all get too excited, why don't you take a cold shower with some statistics?
In any case, the idea here is that Joe Biden is on a run.
Now, his run, by the way, his very successful run has coincided with him being comatose in Delaware.
He just went completely off the campaign trail.
He merges every so often to drop some mashed potatoes from his face hole.
And then he goes back into hiding in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
He's been basically incommunicado for the last three to four weeks.
Well, now he's back out there on the campaign trail.
And what is he saying?
He's saying, everyone who opposes me is a semi-fascist.
So Joe Biden was addressing Democratic Party donors at a private fundraiser in Maryland on Thursday evening, according to Politico.
And he said, what we are seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of extreme MAGA philosophy.
He said, it's not just Trump.
It's the entire philosophy that underpins the, I'm going to say something, it's like semi-fascism.
It's not just Trump.
It's you.
It's me.
It's everyone who disagrees with Joe Biden.
It's part of a semi-fascist movement.
Which is an amazing statement coming from Captain Unity over here.
So you are part of a semi-fascist movement.
One thing that I've noticed about American politicians when they talk about fascism is they don't know what the hell they're talking about.
When they say fascism, what they typically mean is just to compare their opponents to Hitler.
They don't actually know anything about the history of fascism.
They don't know anything about Mussolini.
They don't know anything about the preconditions to Hitler's rise.
Nothing.
Well, let me make one thing pretty clear about the rise of Hitler in Germany.
The precondition to Hitler's rise in Germany It's one economic chaos and two massive expansion of centralized executive authority in Germany.
The fascist state actually existed in Germany before Hitler.
Go back and read about 1932 and 1931 and the period immediately preceding the rise of Hitler.
And what you will see is that virtually all authority had been vested in the executive branch of the German government.
Which means if we're talking about the future of fascism in the United States, you might be a little more wary of, you know, just doing everything from the executive branch without any sort of executive authority whatsoever.
But that's exactly what Joe Biden is doing.
So yesterday, Joe Biden was out hobnobbing with crowds.
There's video of him doing this, right?
He's speaking and then he went out and he's shaking hands with the crowd.
We know that Jill, by the way, came down with a rebound case of COVID-19.
So here he is, shaking hands with tons of people.
He was on C-SPAN yesterday.
Now, the reason that I'm pointing out Joe Biden An elderly daughter bumping fists and shaking hands with a large crowd of people in close proximity is that Joe Biden says that his executive authority for relieving $500 billion in student loan debt comes thanks to a COVID emergency.
So just to get this straight, the COVID emergency is over with regard to the southern border.
So we have to let in as many illegal immigrants as possible.
But the COVID emergency is still going so strong that he can use his executive authority to relieve half a trillion dollars in student loan debt.
Does that sound like democracy in action to you?
Does that sound constitutional to you?
Of course not, but it's not about that.
It's about paying off his political allies with your money.
And of course, this is going to have some rather dire economic side effects.
According to the Wall Street Journal, President Biden's decision to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for millions of borrowers will have broad economic consequences, including on inflation, consumer behavior, and government budgets.
Assuming the plan survives any potential legal challenges, the move to cancel a lump sum of debt for more than 40 million borrowers and change repayment rules could provide a modest boost to longer-term inflation and lead to larger federal deficits, economists say.
In the short term, some, such as Obama administration economist Jason Furman, say the debt relief risks, quote, While stream analysts say the near-term impact is likely to be limited because debt relief isn't like other forms of stimulus, individuals won't immediately have more money to spend because almost all borrowers haven't been paying during a government repayment moratorium during the COVID-19 pandemic.
If all borrowers who are eligible for debt cancellation enroll, student loan balances will be reduced by about $400 billion.
According to a Goldman Sachs analysis released on Thursday, their economists found student loan payments would fall from 0.4% of personal income to 0.3%.
Debt cancellation isn't likely to have much of an immediate effect on inflation, they found.
However, as you cancel debt, obviously this means that it's easier for all of these borrowers to give out new loans in an inflationary economy, in an inflationary educational economy, because you haven't actually capped the price of tuition.
You're subsidizing predatory lenders and irresponsible borrowers.
That is what a student loan debt payout looks like.
And yet this administration, because they are wildly dishonest, they're out there saying that, you know, we have a great record on fiscal responsibility.
So here is Karine Jean-Pierre, the extraordinarily untalented press secretary, suggesting yesterday that this administration, you should trust them when they simply say that they're going to hand out hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to people who didn't pay back their student loans for degrees in art history at the local JUCO.
You should trust them because they're super fiscally responsible.
Here is Karine Jean-Pierre yesterday.
The president's record on fiscal responsibility is second to none.
And last year alone, you've heard us talk about this because this is incredibly important.
He achieved $350 billion in deficit reduction, and this year it's projected by the end of the fiscal year to be at $1.7 trillion deficit reduction.
This is historic.
What we're talking about here is historic numbers because of the work that this president has done when it comes to the economy.
Oh, they're really, really fiscally responsible.
This is what they are.
Okay, now, there's only one problem with the idea that they're fiscally responsible.
They are wildly fiscally irresponsible, this administration.
In fact, one of the things that they've been claiming is going to carve out from the deficit, one of the things that's going to claw back money from the deficits that they continue to, the debts they continue to expand, is the IRS enforcement agents.
They say that they're not going to go after low-income people.
That is not true.
The IRS 100% is going to go after people who make under $400,000 a year for sure.
Well, now they are reporting that the IRS revenue boost from stronger enforcement is now being scaled back by the CBO.
So remember, they said, don't worry, guys, when we say that we're going to spend a bunch of money on climate and we're going to the Inflation Reduction Act and the American Prosperity Plan and all this garbage, when we do all that stuff, we're going to claw back all that revenue via the IRS.
Well, now the CBO is outlining its revised estimate Thursday, adjusting the projected 10-year revenue generated by the nearly $80 billion in IRS spending included in the law Biden signed last week.
They've reduced it by well over $20 billion, according to the CBO.
So all the money they say they're going to get by auditing you, even that is going down.
Well, this administration, they keep saying they are fiscally responsible.
I've yet to see the evidence that they are fiscally responsible.
But here is the thing, the fact that they are taking all of your money and they're using all of your money to bail out a bunch of deadbeat borrowers.
And deadbeat college lenders.
You know, maybe you might be thinking to yourself at this point, have I ever paid my taxes?
Like really, maybe, well, maybe you have.
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It's not a loan.
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The challenge is getting your hands on it.
So how do you cut through that red tape and get your business the refund money?
head on over to getrefunds.com.
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Again, if you overpaid your taxes, why wouldn't you just go get some of your tax money back?
The team at getrefunds.com has already returned Okay, let's talk about a fiscally responsible administration.
to getrefunds.com. Click on qualify me answer a few questions. This payroll tax refund is only available for a limited amount of time. Don't miss out head on over to getrefunds.com again that is getrefunds.com and get all the information you need. Meanwhile, you're talking about a fiscally responsible regime. Okay, let's talk about a fiscally responsible administration.
According to the Washington Post. Millions in COVID aid went to retrain veterans.
397 of them landed jobs.
So we spent, during the American Rescue Plan, the great savior of the American economy from this fiscally responsible administration, they spent $400 million on a veteran retraining program.
$400 million.
So how many veterans actually got jobs because of that veteran retraining program?
397.
That is a million dollars per job.
We should have just given a million dollars to 397 veterans.
They've been better off doing that.
Complete and total waste of money, according to the Washington Post.
In February, the VA cut off tuition payments to a company called FutureTech, which is one of these training programs.
Because, again, they were just wasting money, and they hadn't actually generated any jobs for these people.
As of August 1st, only about 6,800 veterans had enrolled in the program.
That's far fewer than the 17,250 Congress created it to serve.
Only 397 had landed new jobs.
So as always, the government spends a crapload of your money and achieves zero of your desired results.
But don't worry, guys, they're fiscally responsible.
And by the way, how irresponsible is this student loan forgiveness?
Here's how irresponsible the student loan forgiveness is.
If you paid back your loans during COVID, and some people, they had their student loan borrowing sort of postponed.
If you paid it back, if you actually were responsible, you went ahead and you paid it back, now the government is going to refund you that money.
I'm not kidding.
So the government is actually going to, they're going to take the money that you paid back to your student loan and they're going to give it back to you even though you weren't experiencing an emergency at all because you paid back the loan.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the few Americans who continue to make student loan payments during a federal pause enacted at the beginning of the pandemic will now be eligible for a refund.
The Education Department clarified on Thursday those who paid off all or part of their federal student loans since March 13, 2020 still qualify for forgiveness.
Borrowers can request a refund by calling their loan servicer directly.
So if you spent the last 20 years paying off your student loans, no.
But if you paid off since the beginning of the pandemic, yes.
And we are still in a COVID emergency, according to Joe Biden.
So we're going to just refund you this money.
And these geniuses are telling you this is not going to affect inflation.
It won't.
According to Pete Buttigieg, it won't.
And we know we can believe Pete Buttigieg because he was the mayor of a tiny town in Indiana and also is gay.
Those are his chief qualifications for telling you about inflation.
So here's Pete Buttigieg.
It's also a balanced program.
It's a tailored program paying special attention to Pell Grant recipients who are some of those who have experienced proportionately the most harm from trying to keep up with the weight of that debt.
It's got an income cap so it's targeted at lower and middle income borrowers.
And what I've seen is there's a range of analysis on it, but from what I've seen, most economic observers do not think this is a major factor affecting the course of inflation.
Guys, it'll be totally fine.
By the way, at the same exact time, Miguel Cardona, the education secretary, he was asked on national television about what's gonna happen when the loan repayments come due, right?
When all of a sudden you're now repaying your loan, but you've had your loan relieved.
He says, hey, billions of dollars are gonna flow into the economy.
Wait, I was just told by your, so you've got the secretary of transportation saying no inflation.
And now you have the education secretary saying billions of dollars will flow into the economy.
That generates inflation.
So here's our education secretary.
What we know is that in January, billions of dollars are going to funnel back into the economy because these loans are going to restart.
And that's going to offset the expenses of these loan forgiveness.
So it is an offset.
Economists are saying this.
And we're thrilled that it's going to get Americans back on their feet and moving forward.
So the money is going to flow into the economy and that is going to generate inflation.
But according to Miguel Cardona, guys, don't worry, it's not going to elevate education costs.
So if you just subsidize things, it doesn't raise the price, which would come as a shock to literally all economists in the history of economics.
When you subsidize things and you don't control the price, when you continue to boost the baseline, the price also goes up because the supply and demand curve has not changed.
Here's Miguel Cardona explaining that even though we're about to dump literally hundreds of billions of dollars into education, don't worry, that's not going to raise the prices.
It should be the first time in human history that's never happened, if that were true.
Are you concerned that a policy like this one, $10,000 in forgiveness, kind of gives a signal to higher education institutions that it's okay to charge the amount that they are charging for students because this debt will just be forgiven?
Absolutely not.
We've increased accountability in the higher education space.
We revoked accreditation privileges for groups that are giving accreditation to schools that are taking advantage of students.
We've shut down Corinthian, ITT.
We're not done.
We're going to make sure that the return on investment in higher education is there, and we're going to count on our higher education partners to work with us on that, and we're going to be watching, too.
We're not afraid of naming and shaming institutions that are taking advantage of our students who are trying to make a life for themselves, or first-generation college students who are being sold a bill of goods and never being delivered on.
They're a joke.
I'm sorry, this is a joke.
First of all, the notion that the only educational institutions taking advantage of the increased tuition and the credentialing that is now occurring, that's inflating the requirements for jobs, the only people who are doing that are the hairdressing university down in a local inner city.
It's not true.
Look at the administrative costs at these universities.
You'll see the number of administrators at these universities has been growing and growing and growing.
And it's all in the diversity, equity and inclusion aspects of the university.
The majors that are growing in terms of number of people being hired, Are all the garbage liberal arts majors.
It's not the STEM majors.
So it's it's amazing.
But don't worry, the cost won't go up, except they'll go up.
Also, we're going to toss hundreds of billions of dollars into it.
Don't worry, it won't inflate in education costs.
It won't inflate the economy generally.
Well, Stephen Ratner, former top economic advisor to Barack Obama, he's like, yeah, guys, this is actually going to create rising tuition.
Duh.
I think it is an important point to recognize that this program, or programs like this, do encourage, in effect, more raising of tuition because you're subsidizing the students.
But other than the government coming in and somehow controlling college tuition, which I'm not sure any of us, at least I would not particularly be in favor of, this is what happens.
Okay, so this administration is lying about everything.
And they are doing something deeply unfair.
And they're trying to pretend that it's fair, but it is deeply unfair.
And they continue to maintain, by the way, that this is actually just, it's good for people, right?
We're helping the low-income people.
No, you are helping people who went to college, some of whom did not pay off their student loans.
You're helping a bunch of people who are middle income to upper income.
That is what you are doing here.
And you are doing it by subsidizing from people who either already paid their loans or people who never went to college in the first place.
This is a redistribution toward key demographic constituencies for the Democratic Party.
And they're lying to you when they say that they're doing this to help low-income people.
It's just not true.
You know, here's what I want to know.
I want to know how many members of the Biden administration are directly impacted by this.
I want to know.
I want to know.
Karine Jean-Pierre, she says, you know, she had to get a Pell Grant when she went to college.
OK.
And I want to know if you're actually getting your loan relief here.
I know that there are members of Congress who are.
We've already heard from people like Rashida Tlaib and we've heard from Ilhan Omar.
We've heard from AOC that they still have outstanding loan debt, which means that you're basically paying yourself, guys.
So, I want to know if Corinne Jean-Pierre still has outstanding loans that she's going to have relieved right here.
Here's Corinne Jean-Pierre talking about how she had to get a Pell Grant.
Well, first of all, you're welcome, since that's a taxpayer-funded Pell Grant.
I don't understand why the fact that you had to get a Pell Grant when you were in college means that now you should have your student loan relieved.
Explain.
When you look at the Pell Grant provision and you add that piece to it, that adds another, that could go up to $20,000, right?
And so that's incredibly targeted, that's really important.
Those borrowers who are on Pell Grant, let's think about this, right?
Some of us in here probably had gotten Pell Grant.
I had to get a Pell Grant when I went to college.
And those are families that are $60,000 households.
And that's nearly $60,000 per household.
And if you look at it by half, that's 30.
That's 30, part of that tranche is $30,000 people per household.
Well man, she's so bad at this.
Don't worry.
It's fair.
This is actually a program that is clearly designed to redistribute money to middle and upper income people who have college degrees in a higher income trajectory.
Those are the people who really are the poorest.
Meanwhile, you have Elizabeth Warren, who used to earn $400,000 a year teaching at Harvard Law School, lecturing you about the cost of higher education.
It's amazing.
You know, I think of the fairness argument this way.
I went to college.
My daddy was a janitor.
I went to college when it cost $50 a semester, when a part-time job would cover the cost of college tuition.
It doesn't do that anymore.
And that is a real generational fairness problem.
That opportunity is just not out there.
Why, Elizabeth?
Why?
Why are the costs up?
Explain.
Why?
I mean, really?
You're saying that you used to be able to go for like 50 bucks a semester?
So what changed?
And the answer is massive federal subsidization of education.
A massive change in the nature of the elites in the United States who now demand a college degree for you to be a janitor.
I mean, this is the problem.
And yet they're pressing forward as though this is done on behalf of the poor.
It's just, it's sickening.
Okay, what's even more sickening, truly sickening, I mean morally sickening, is what the White House is now doing to political opponents of their student loan bailout plan.
Okay, what they are doing right now is disgusting.
Truly morally egregious.
So the White House has decided that if you oppose Their giant boondoggle $500 billion bailout of the most privileged people in our society, namely college graduates and people who have student loan debt.
If you oppose that, we are going to name and shame you and come after you personally.
That's what this White House is very united.
They're all about unity and the beauty of all of us Americans.
We're in the same boat.
Now we are just going to jack you up and the way that we're going to jack you up.
If you are a political opponent of this, Then we are going to find out if you took any PPP money.
If you took PPP money, then we are going to name and shame you.
Okay, so, this is an unbelievably dishonest and disgusting argument.
This is the Paycheck Protection Program under the Small Business Administration.
So, I got a taste of this myself over the last couple of days.
Okay, because I said, generally when you take out a loan, you should pay off your loans.
I know this has become like some sort of sign of moral disrepair to say that if you take out money, you should actually pay back the money.
Because we live in the stupidest of all possible times in which it is considered more moral to have somebody else pay your bills than for you to pay your own bills.
I understand there's an entire wing of American politics that now suggests that you are morally superior if you steal other people's money.
Bernie Sanders is morally superior because he wants to steal my money and give it to somebody else.
Redistributing from A to B by sticking your hand in A's pocket, even if A already paid off his student loans and B didn't.
That's more morally, you're morally superior human being.
And this means that we can rip the living crap out of you if you are a person who actually paid your taxes and paid off your loans.
And the way that we're going to rip you is by calling you a hypocrite.
And what we're gonna try and do is dig up material showing that you took Paycheck Protection Program money.
So, a couple of days ago, around the internet, I'm talking about hundreds of thousands of retweets, there was a screencap of a person, I mentioned this yesterday on the show, named Ben Shapiro, in Los Angeles, who owns a real estate office, and who took something like 20 grand in PPP money.
I don't know that Ben Shapiro, I never heard that Ben Shapiro, it ain't me.
Around the internet, it rocketed because since I was against student loan bailouts, I must have taken PPP money.
This made me a hypocrite.
Twitter, which has been just cracking down on misinformation, obviously.
I mean, Twitter just hates misinformation.
They allowed this stuff to rocket around the internet.
All those tweets are still up.
They're a lie, and they're not true.
But even if they had been true, which they are not, Daily Wire has never taken a dime in PPP money.
I have not taken a dime in PPP money, even if that were true.
The attempt, and this has become now, this White House is very online, the attempt by the left to equate taking PPP money with a student loan bailout is disgusting.
It is a morally egregious thing to do.
What the Biden administration is doing right now to target people who oppose it is really disreputable.
But let me tell you something about reputation.
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All the fixes really, really expensive because of supply chain problems, because of inflation.
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Chain stores have different price tiers for professional mechanics and do-it-yourselfers.
RockAuto.com's prices are the same for everybody and they're reliably low.
That means they're not going to change prices based on what the market will bear like many airlines and marketplace sites do.
Their prices make it affordable for customers to keep their daily drives and classics safely on the road.
rockauto.com has been in the auto parts business for 20 years.
Family owned, their goal is to make auto parts available and affordable and keep you safe on the road.
Honestly, your car is maybe worth more than your house at this point, so you want to make sure that you keep that car running.
The rockauto.com catalog is remarkably easy to navigate.
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That's RockAuto.com.
Be sure to write Shapiro in their How Did You Hear About Us box so they know that I sent you.
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Perhaps.
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So how disgusting is this, White House?
Comparing PPP to student loan bailouts is disreputable.
It really is.
A student loan bailout is where you took a loan, voluntarily, in order to go get a degree, in whatever it is you chose to get a degree, and then you chose not to pay off that loan.
Or you couldn't pay off that loan because you made a bad decision to take the loan in the first place.
That is not even remotely close to what happened under Paycheck Protection.
Paycheck Protection Program was effectively a Fifth Amendment taking.
What happened is that the federal and state governments told you at the beginning of COVID to shut down your business.
They told you that you would be punished by law if you opened your business.
I was living in LA County at the time.
If you went in and opened your business, you would be fined.
The police would come and shut down your establishment.
We had to close our offices.
Hey, this is something that the government mandated.
It was not something we did voluntarily.
We would have had our offices open.
Our employees were young.
Our employees were healthy.
Didn't matter.
We had to shut it down anyway by local law.
And so what the federal government did, and this had bipartisan approval across the board, everyone, right, left, center, agreed on this.
And the idea was, if we're going to force you to shut down your business, then we have two choices.
Your employees are all either going to go on unemployment, which is going to bankrupt the unemployment system, or we are going to effectively fill in the gap that we just created.
We told you you could not open your business.
We took property without just compensation.
And so now we're going to compensate you for that.
And so if you were a company, you were assured by the government, if you were a company and you took that money and you paid your employees to keep them operating, to make sure that they could pay their bills and get groceries for their family, that if you did those things, that you would then be compensated by the government because the government had forced you to shut down your business.
And there was nothing morally bad about this.
That this did not make you some sort of government debtor.
This didn't make you some sort of deadbeat.
And what this was, was the government actively telling you you could not operate in the free market, and so therefore the government had to compensate for this.
That's what PPP was.
That's why it had bipartisan approval.
That's why people like me, I'm as fiscally conservative as it gets.
Even I was saying, okay, if the government is telling you, literally you can't, the analogy that I use is if the government drives a Ford F-150 truck through the front door of your home, they are then going to have to pay you to fix the home.
Because that's what the government did, economically speaking, to hundreds of thousands of businesses across the country.
And so lots of business owners applied for and got PPP grants, right, forgivable loans.
That's what they did.
So now, many of those business owners are saying, because they paid their taxes, because they actually used that money to pay their employees, because they were told by the government they could not operate in the free market space, if you now oppose the government bailing out a bunch of art history and lesbian dance theory majors over at Brown University, if you oppose that, the White House will name you, and they will shame you, and they will claim that you are a deadbeat.
This is disgusting.
It truly is.
So the White House has now an entire tweet thread calling out Republican members of Congress who owned businesses and who took PPP money to pay their employees.
So the White House tweeted out Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven.
And they named Congressman Bern Buchanan, who had $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven.
Congressman Mark Wayne Mullen, $1.4 million in PPP loans forgiven.
Oh, you mean because you told them that they couldn't operate their businesses and you wanted their employees to continue getting paid on a bipartisan basis?
And now you're saying that they don't have the ability or the right or the moral wherewithal to object to deadbeat lenders receiving a bailout from the government and deadbeat borrowers receiving a bailout from the government?
This is...
This is the comparison that you're making.
It just demonstrates you cannot trust people in government when it comes to quote-unquote no strings attached grants.
You can't.
They're dishonest.
They're damned liars.
The government literally said in 2020 shut down your business and here are some grants to keep your employees operating.
Two years later, two years, the current White House is saying to every small business owner in the country that if you took PPP money to keep your employees afloat so they didn't have to go to the food bank, for example, that if you took that money and you had to take it because the government told you you had to take it, that if you took that money, you now no longer have the right to object to the socialization of the American educational system.
You don't have the right to object to it.
So in other words, the government used its force to shut down your business.
Which effectually meant that you had to take government money.
And now that we've shoved this heroin of government money into your arm, we are now going to say that you no longer have the right to object to us shoving that heroin into anybody else.
You can't object to you becoming a subsidizer of the heroin injections that are government subsidies.
It's an amazing thing.
There are always strings attached.
The government has the plenary power to ruin you financially and reputationally.
They ruin you financially to shut down your business.
And then if you take the money, they ruin your reputation.
All right, so let me just explain that the same jackasses who are attacking the businesses who took government cash to keep their employees operational.
Those same jackasses who are attacking businesses are currently saying that the continuing COVID emergency justifies bailing out predatory college lenders and irresponsible student borrowers.
There's no moral principle at stake here.
There's just whatever is the latest baton that you can wield against business owners.
There's a frequent hallmark of the political left, is that they skew the free market, they destroy the free market, and then, after destroying the free market, they blame the free market for all of the shortcomings that they themselves have created.
The true moral disgustingness, it really is a moral issue.
When you attack a business, after destroying the business, And the business has to take money from the government in order to pay its employees.
When you then attack the business for opposing future bailouts that affect that business, that affect them as taxpayers, that affect the employees, that are redistribution on behalf of political interests that the White House is pressing without constitutional authority.
You want to talk semi-fascism?
That's what semi-fascism looks like.
Disgusting stuff.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
You don't want to miss it.
We'll be getting into what is, effectually, the greatest trailer in the history of television.
Apple TV Plus has a brand new series called Gutsy from Hillary Clinton.
We're going to play the trailer and discuss this.
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